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Last night Facebook announced that they’ve upgrade their video service. There are a couple exciting upgrades. First, videos are now HD quality. This isn’t a surprising upgrade considering that YouTube has also upgraded their video service. The second upgrade is the ability for users to embed videos outside of the site. This feature was previously only available via a Facebook embed greasemonkey script which we wrote about over a year ago.
It’s great to see Facebook upgrading their video product but I’m somewhat surprised that it took Facebook this long to enable video embedding. There’s one other feature which is something no other video provider currently offers. If you wish to make your videos viewable only to your friends, Facebook will respect the privacy settings that you set for all of your videos.
I’m guessing this will provide Facebook with a fairly significant boost in the number of people using their video product. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t currently provide statistics as to the number of viewers who saw the video but Facebook could theoretically outdo the competitors in the analytics regard. Imagine imbedding a video and then viewing demographic information about that video’s viewers.
There is a lot of potential with the Facebook video product and it’s clear that the company sees the potential. I’m sure that just managing the server requirements of running a large video platform is challenging but hopefully the company rolls out a robust analytics service in the near future. Once that takes place I believe we could see a more professional group of users start using the video product.
Too bad Facebook will take down your video if it has even background music that is copyrighted and belongs to a third-party. Yes, while that remains an issue of ownership, other popular video sites including YouTube and Vimeo don’t seem to have this problem.
Which is why I can’t trust Facebook for my video uploading and embedding into my professional site. If I were to use one of my older videos I’d made years ago (some of which contain music written by big name bands, etc.), and Facebook took it down, that’d mean my site was without that video too.
Sorry, but until that issue is something we don’t have to worry about, I’ll stick to Vimeo.
Nick, you should check out the video I did with Facebook’s Chris Putnam. He runs the video team there and explains the changes: http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/facebook-releases-hd-video
Youtube and Vimeo have both taken down videos because of DMCA- ever hear of the Prince dancing baby incident? http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3777651 I’d wager that any video sharing site will have DMCA takedown notices once they get big enough.
In case you hadn’t noticed I updated my script(and my addon too https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9614) to mimic the “Embed this video” link, but add it to every video page instead of just your own videos. Also if you use my script you will get the code for the HD video, whereas Facebook will just give you the regular quality video. My script has also made all the links(download and convert) point to the HD video by default. You can change the video quality back to regular through the “Customize code” popup.