Social media giant Facebook has rolled out its video streaming service Watch worldwide. The platform was initially launched in the US a year ago.
In this time, “we’ve made the experience more social – like making it easier to see which videos your friends have liked or shared, creating shows that have audience participation at their core, and opening Watch to videos from Pages,” Facebook’s head of video Fidji Simo wrote in a blog post.
Every month, more than 50 million people in the US watched videos in Watch for at least one minute. The social media giant reports that the total time spent watching videos on the platform has increased 14 times since the beginning of 2018.
The expansion of Watch worldwide will open the platform to creators and publishers around the world. With this, Facebook has also expanded its Ad Breaks program, which inserts ads into videos, as is done by YouTube when the platform is used without a paid membership. Facebook’s Ad Breaks feature will be open to creators and publishers who hit a certain metric.
The BBC reports, “To begin with, only videos shown to audiences in the UK, US, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand will have this facility.
“The revenue split will be 55% to the creators and 45% to Facebook.”
The rollout of the Watch feature worldwide comes after Facebook’s launch of Instagram TV (IGTV) in June 2018.
Some of the Australian and New Zealand publishers and content creators whose videos have surfaced on Facebook’s Watch are:
How To Dad
Mike Goldman
Beauticate
Optus Sport, World Surf League
CrossFit
Seven’s House Rules
ABC News
Vice Australia
Seven News