Facebook prepares to rival YouTube with new video tools

Further evidence confirming reports that Facebook is indeed set to take on YouTube has surfaced.

In a blog post uploaded by Facebook Product Manager Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza - who was previously Senior Product Manager at Vevo - the social media giant announced new updates for video distribution.

Facebook has enhanced its video upload system and introduced a Video Library to “give publishers more control over how their videos are organized and shared.”

New customisation tools give users the ability to: restrict the audience of a video by age and gender; set an expiration date; publish directly to the Videos tab without distributing to News Feed; label videos based on interest categories; publish "secret videos" (similar to YouTube's unlisted videos feature) and prevent the embedding of videos on third-party sites. 

On the “secret videos” tool, the post said: “This is useful for publishers who want to host videos on Facebook, embed them on third-party sites or share them with anyone who has the URL, without posting them anywhere else on Facebook.”

Similarly to YouTube, the Video Library tool in its most basic sense allows publishers to organise their content. However it also provides analytics on the overall performance of videos, make bulk changes, manage distribution and edit metadata after uploading.

The new features will roll out to Page owners globally over the coming weeks.

As TMN previously reported, Facebook is in talks with the major labels for ad-supported full-length music videos as well as an audio streaming service that will compete with Spotify and Apple Music. It’s believed the video service will see rightsholders receive 55% of the ad revenue split and Facebook 45%. 

Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users and 4 billion native videos are watched on the site each day.