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Facebook tackles YouTube with video counter, hits a billion plays per day
Though it's still far from YouTube, Facebook fired a shot across its competitor's bow by saying it now serves up a billion native video views per day. In addition, its latest update (rolling out soon) has a YouTube-like view counter for public videos, making it easier to find popular selections or see how your own uploads are doing. Facebook said two-thirds of video views were from mobile devices, a stat no doubt helped significantly by the new auto-playing feature that's on by default. A recent video ranking change also gives frequent video watchers more options. But as the NY Times pointed out, Facebook's social nature can also send a video viral quickly. Beyoncé, for instance, garnered 2.4 million Facebook pageviews for a VMA video in four hours, while YouTube only chalked up a few thousand in the same time. Facebook also touted improved metrics for publishers, and is clearly interested in generating more video revenue -- it recently purchased a video ad firm called LiveRail.
iPhone OS 4 to include Facebook video uploads?
We already knew that Apple was likely ratcheting up the social networking integration in iOS 4 -- that is, if the addition of Linked Contacts and .plist entries referring to Facebook means anything (and it probably does). Adding further flame to the fire, the gang at 9to5Mac.com have dug up a bit of code that appears to handle video exporting to the popular social networking site. As near as we can tell, users will be able to send files at 480 x 480, 30 FPS -- and since Facebook is already using HTML5, you won't have that pesky Steve Jobs / Flash thing to worry about.
