While sharing YouTube videos on the social network will remain an option for a long time to come, Facebook would rather you uploaded your videos straight to their website.
Rumors about Facebook launching its own video streaming service have been floating around for a month now, so encouraging people to upload straight to the social network instead of linking to other websites seems to all be part of the plan.
The Next Web noticed the above message when linking to a YouTube video on their Facebook page. All in all, this is an attempt to drive more traffic to the social network, under the pretext that native videos are more attractive to customers.
I said customers and not friends because the “Boost Post” button from the image makes it clear that this feature is meant for businesses, at least for the time being. Should Facebook make this available to individuals, all sorts of problems could arise from the fact that some people would start uploading copyrighted viral content in order to make their page more popular. Facebook cannot detect stolen videos automatically, but according to an e-mail sent by a spokesperson to The Next Web, here’s how the company will handle copyright infringement:
“For years we’ve used the Audible Magic system to help prevent unauthorized video content. We also have reporting tools in place to allow content owners to report potential copyright infringement, and upon receiving a valid notice we remove unauthorized content. We also suspend accounts of people with repeated IP violations when appropriate.
As video continues to grow on Facebook, we’re actively exploring further solutions to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content, tailored for our unique platform and ecosystem.
This is a significant technical challenge to solve, but we have a team working on it and expect to have more to share this summer. As with all products and experiences on Facebook, we’re listening to feedback, and want to continue to improve our content management tools for people and publishers.”
The second motivation is that the success of Facebook videos are easier to track in Page Insights. There’s no denying about that, but I’d say that this move could’ve been done more tactfully. This way, it just looks like the social network is trying to manipulate businesses so that it makes more and more money.
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