Only Celebs Get Facebook Livestreaming. We're Liabilities

Facebook's new Live for Facebook Mentions livestreaming service is only for recognizable faces.
IntroducingMentions1
Facebook

This week, Facebook introduced Live for Facebook Mentions, a new live streaming service reminiscent of Periscope and Meerkat save for one crucial difference: it's only for recognizable faces. Which makes perfect sense.

At first, Facebook cordoning off the new livestreaming service seems counterintuitive. After all, the current wave of streaming apps—remember, Ustream and Justin.tv launched back in 2007—are inherently egalitarian. Periscope, Meerkat, Beme; they all reinforce the inherent worth of your point of view, no matter who or what or where you are. They're predicated on the notion that others might want to see the world through your eyes.

That may be true of Facebook's livestreaming program someday. But for now, those principles only hold true if you're one of the beautiful people. Frankly, the rest us are too much of a liability.

How the Other Half Facebooks

To understand how Live with Facebook Mentions works, it's helpful to understand the Facebook Mentions part. Mentions, launched last year, is an app that's strictly for those who merit a verified account. The app's members number in the thousands (compared to the Facebook's 1.49 billion monthly users), and it lets those luminaries and their social media interns follow who's talking about them online, start up a Q&A with fans, and engage in all of the normal picture-posting and commenting that the Facebook plebs do.

Nobody likes a velvet rope, but the fact is even if you had access to most Facebook Mentions functions, you'd never use them. People with hundreds of thousands of followers have an understandably different set of needs than your Uncle Jeff. Mentions helps them manage those needs.

Lumping Live in with that set of tools, though, feels somehow different. Livestreaming is, after all, something for which there's a demonstrated general interest. Country Star Luke Bryan™ wouldn't have appreciably more fun livestreaming than you would, right? And your friends, if they really are your friends, presumably care at least as much about your sandwich prep as they do that of NBC News Man Lester Holt™. It's handing a shiny new toy to the people who already have all the toys. What's the fun in that?

"Will they face some backlash? Yeah," says Alan Pelzsharpe, research director at 451 Research. "But I think it will be pretty short-lived. Realistically, we're talking about online advertising and brand promotion. We're not talking about you and I sharing an update from the barbecue we went to."

Which is to say, Facebook doesn't give these tools to celebrities simply to be kind. It does so because it needs celebrities to use Facebook as often and as efficiently as possible.

Kids These Days

It's almost a cliche at this point, but that doesn't make it untrue: Facebook isn't cool. Not for teens up through recent college grads, anyway.

"Young people today may well have a Facebook page, but they don't use it very often," says Pelzsharpe. "It's for family updates. It's just not something that's incredibly active for them. Facebook needs to add things to pull them back and make them relevant."

In many ways, a livestream from a favored celeb makes a perfect hook. A notification that a famous person you follow is about to go live is a guarantee that you're about to see content that you literally can't anywhere else. You can leave comments and possibly have them respond in real time. You can see what your friends are watching. And should you miss a transmission, you can find the recordings either in your News Feed or on the page of your favorite famous friend.

"If you look back just a couple of years, it was all about texting, but young people really leapt onto video in a way that wasn't really expected," says Pelzsharpe. "It does help bolster that demographic for them."

The only part of the puzzle that doesn't quite fit so far? The celebrities Facebook has enlisted to lead the charge. Bryan and Holt will be joined by Martha Stewart, Serena Williams, and Michael Bublé, none of which are exactly Tiger Beat material. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and High School Musical 3: Senior Year's Ashley Tisdale may skew younger, but it's going to take more than that to tear a significant number of eyeballs away from Snapchat.

That's also fine, though; these are very early days for Live with Facebook Mentions. Which is another important reason why Facebook won't let you use it.

Baby Steps

Yes, Periscope and Vine and Beme are apps of the people. That's great in theory! In practice, though, people are boring. And have shaky hands. And use awful lighting. And have an irrepressible need to film their sex parts and share them with strangers.

In other words, most lifestreams are bad, if not totally unwatchable. Besides, Facebook already has enough trouble snuffing out the still-image pornography and beheadings (yep!) as it is. For better or worse, adding a live element makes that kind of content scrubbing virtually impossible.

"One of the things they've got to work out is just how much moderation is required," says Pelzsharpe. "You just don't know what people want to stream. I think they want to work out what the risks are there, and how difficult it would be to roll it out to everyone else."

Those same questions surely keep Periscope and Meerkat product managers up at night, but they have the distinct advantage of being new platforms, with rules yet to be defined. Facebook, on the other hand, is arguably the most influential distributor of content on the planet. As such, it's understandably guarded about what gets shared, and how. Martha Stewart might not be your cup of herbal chai, but she's probably not illicitly streaming Game of Thrones episodes, either.

This doesn't mean you'll never get your chance to livestream on Facebook, if that's even something you especially want. It's best for now to think of Live for Facebook Mentions as a pilot program, the safest possible way to check out what the kids are into before broadening it to everyone or waiting for the fad to pass. Facebook's never been shy about aggressively expanding its products if it thinks they have promise as a platform—just look at Messenger's journey the last two years.

If and when livestreaming takes off in mass market way, there's little chance Facebook will leave it solely to celebrity lenses. Although at that point you'll likely have to shift from feeling left out to feeling annoyed that Facebook jettisoned yet another feature, forcing you to download yet another standalone Facebook app that used to be a feature.