While Facebook is the largest photo platform on the web, the company only recently became a dominant force in the video streaming space. In the past month, the company doubled the number of video streams from 110.418 million streams to 216.765 million streams according to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers. That’s a dramatic increase, making the site the third largest video site on the web, behind YouTube and Hulu.
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This afternoon Hulu announced the launch of Hulu desktop which is extremely impressive. The service lets users view all Hulu videos through a single application which provides an interactive interface for navigating videos and queuing up new ones. It’s essentially a video media player for your desktop. So what ever happened to that Hulu and Facebook Connect partnership that was announced a year ago? So far we still haven’t seen Connect implemented on Hulu.com.
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Want to call your Facebook friends via video chat? Soon enough you’ll be able to. Earlier today one of our readers sent us a link to one of Facebook’s cached JavaScript files which reveals a number of clues as to a soon to be released video chat service. There’s no way to mistake the code which is still currently accessible. There are actual notification messages including “Waiting for your friend…”, “Video call denied.”, “Incoming call:”, and “Loading video call…”
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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.
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In a small but significant change, Facebook has removed the text at the bottom of all videos which provides users with a way to publicly share those videos. Why Facebook decided to eliminate public video sharing I’m not quite sure. One reason could be that they simply want all individuals that view a video to be active users of the site.

What makes this change relatively significant is that it is a move toward become more of a walled garden and not less of one. As Facebook opens up through Facebook Connect, one would expect more open sharing to take place. Even Mark Zuckerberg said last week at Web 2.0 Summit that the public sharing of feeds is possible in the future.

For the time being though there is little need for the company to have an open policy. One of the major reasons is that there is no open competitor that has anywhere near the same number of users. While FriendFeed provides a completely open feed, the site currently has less than 1 million active users according to Compete.com.

Twitter has almost 4 million active users but it’s still a fraction of the size of Facebook which continues to grow by millions of users a month. We thing Facebook would be better off if it was more open with the content users are entering. Then again, the more content they have access to inside the wall, the less that Google has access to, leaving social discovery to something that takes place within Facebook.

When looking for the best way to make videos go viral, too many marketers just upload their videos to YouTube and cross their fingers, hoping viewers like the content enough to forward on to their friends. Some try “guerrilla” tactics by repurposing social tools like Digg or Stumbleupon, marshaling a small army of friends and co-workers to drive up traffic, and hoping the effort makes a big enough splash to build momentum for their “video campaign”. Unfortunately these rudimentary practices are outdated and far from effective, so their video campaign is much more likely to flounder along with everyone else’s unwatched videos.

Rather than forcing social behavior into a publishing platform and putting all their eggs in the YouTube basket, forward thinking marketers are weaving video into truly social platforms like Facebook because they can take immediate advantage of existing behaviors and tools that are built into these networks. For example, Facebook users are already accustom to sharing links with their friends: they comment, send invites, post items to public places and talk about what they see – it’s a much more engaging experience for the audience than watching a video on YouTube. This behavior has a monumental impact on video campaigns, and from my experience, savvy marketers are excited about the early results they’re seeing.

Beyond traffic and word-of-mouth perks, using Facebook has other benefits for running a successful video campaign. It lets you better control, target and measure your campaign with an incredible level of detail, and has the openness as a platform to build custom functionality that cannot be built into a YouTube campaign. Things like custom players can have interactive options, deeper analytics or data collection features, and rich immersive user experiences. With the Facebook news feed, you also gain visibility and exposure to the entire network when users interact with your content. It’s also easier; you only have to learn one system, instead of learning how to stitch together multiple solutions to fit your needs.

No matter how you slice it, the experience on Facebook is inherently more social purely because of the users’ intentions when they are there, and that’s why savvy marketers are migrating their campaigns to these sites. If you have wondered how to improve your campaigns and generate virality for an engaged, participative, targeted audience, it might be time to think about using social networks.

Tyler Willis is Head of Marketing at Involver, a video marketing platform designed specifically for Facebook. Involver gives companies the opportunity to build, promote, manage and track video campaigns to targeted audiences.

Sometime last weekend it appears that Facebook upgraded the encoding of their video service from FLV files to H.264 with AAC for audio. So what does this mean? Well in simple terms Facebook now has better quality video. For those not up to date on the latest video specifications (I wasn’t when we were tipped off about this upgrade), check out the following description of H.264 provided by Adobe Labs:

H.264 is the next-generation video compression technology in the MPEG-4 standard, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 (ISO/IEC 14496-10). H.264 delivers excellent video quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum — from 3G (Mobile phones) to HD (Broadcast) and everything in between. H.264 is now mandatory for the HD-DVD and Blu-ray specifications (the two formats for high-definition DVDs) and ratified in the latest versions of the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasters) and 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standards.

So three cheers for a new and improved Facebook Video. It appears that this is part of the Flash Player 9 update but Facebook is one of the early implementers of this update. For those that decide to record videos through their webcam, the videos will still be encoded in FLV but anybody that uploads their own videos will receive the higher quality encoding.

Thanks to Michael Medley, author of the Facebook Video greasemonkey script that we previously wrote about, for tipping us off!

It looks like Facebook has entered a gray area when it comes to users’ personal videos. According to Techdirt Facebook is issuing DMCA takedown notices to users that have copyrighted music playing in the background of their videos. That Facebook has technology to automatically check for copyrighted material in videos is impressive in its own right but telling users that they can’t place music in their personal videos is ridiculous.

If a user makes a video public and begins actively promoting that video, they may end up crossing the line. There is definitely a line that ends up being crossed and something tells me that it may have to do with the number of users that have access to a given video. If these videos are private then the takedowns are absolutely absurd. It’s not like this automated filtering will prevent users from creating personal home videos.

Isn’t that what Facebook video is for … personal videos? I understand the concept of going to YouTube and posting a music video or a television show and that being illegal. If you were recording a Bar/Bat Mitzvah or any other party with music and wanted to keep and share the video for sentimental reasons, it would be insane to have someone come and tell you to take it down.

I would have to consult a lawyer at this point when it comes to the legality behind this but I could see this turning into a pretty serious debate. I’ll reach out to the digital media lawyers that I know to see what they have to say. What do you think about users receiving a DMCA notice? Is this crossing the line? Where is the line on this issue?

Update
One of the commenters has posted a copy of one of Facebook’s DMCA takedown notices. Here’s what it says:

Hello,

We have removed your video entitled “*******” uploaded at 11:37pm February 2nd, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio.

If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

Please note that if you re-upload this video without filing a counter notice, or if you upload another video that infringes on the rights of a third party, our system will again remove the content. This could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook account to be disabled.

To file a counter notice:
File a Counter Notification

For Facebook’s video removal policy:
View the Policy

The Facebook Team
copyright@facebook.com