If you watch enough Twitch channels, you may have seen a Premiere — a pre-recorded video that Streams on channel as a live stream. It lets broadcasters recreate the thrill and excitement you’d expect from a TV show premiere, just in an online format. Sound like a good idea? Facebook agrees. It’s testing Premieres, an option that lets creators launch recoreded videos as Facebook Live stream, complete with real-time chats. You can check out a movie trailer or Watch show at the same time as everyone else, rather than compete with your friends to watch before them and if you couldn’t do that your friends spoil everything.
The initial testers include an annoying amount of creators, publishers and shows, but the feature should be available “more broadly” in the near future.
While Premieres isn’t exactly original, it makes eminent sense given Facebook’s increasing emphasis on Watch originals and the nature of many videos you find on Facebook like You tube. It helps producers build hype by giving viewers a specific time to visit their pages, complete with the pop-up notifications you don’t get with regular video posts. And just like a TV premiere, it could create virtual watercooler talk that leads others to wonder what the buzz was about and check out a video themselves. It might also spur the growth of Facebook Live. The format is already successful with over 2 billion streams to date, and that’s from truly live events — it could get yet another boost from recorded clips.
Techtificator 