Tech: Facebook Live gets a social boost and a path to VR

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Facebook Live has added features that make it a much more social platform, including the option to chat privately with friends while watching videos, and the ability for creators to invite others to broadcast alongside them.

Live Chat With Friends is being tested on mobile in several countries and will roll out more broadly later this summer, while Live With is available for all profiles and Pages on iOS.

These two new features should increase engagement with Live videos by improving:

• The consumer experience. Enabling private chats during public live broadcasts lets people watch and experience videos in new ways, and adds to the existing ability to write and read comments on a Live video’s public feed. It reduces friction by allowing users to chat with their friends while watching the video, rather than having to share a link to the video in the Messenger app. This could boost watch time, the number of viewers, and interactions with Facebook Live content.
• The creator experience. Creators can now invite friends into their live video to let people hang out and broadcast together online, via a shared screen. This offers new opportunities for collaboration among creators and could provide benefits for audience building. These two factors, in turn, could encourage creators to go Live more frequently on Facebook, and if more Live content is created, there’s more material for both consumers to watch and engage with, and Facebook to advertise against.

More importantly, these two features also open up a new use case for Facebook Live. More than just improve the existing user experience for Live, they create a new way for users to watch videos, or even just hang out, together on Facebook. In doing this, Facebook is tapping into a budding space in social media based on live and communal media consumption and shared virtual experiences.

Several companies have edged into digital hangouts and shared content experiences already. Houseparty, developed by the founders of the now defunct Meerkat app, is reportedly very popular with teens. Meanwhile, Google rolled out a stand-alone app in March called UpTime for group sharing, watching, and reacting to YouTube videos. Tumblr has a similar app in Cabana. The number of entrants in this space suggests its great potential.

The biggest implication for Facebook here could be in social VR, though this will take a while to manifest. Last October, Facebook’s flagship VR company Oculus unveiled an Avatar system where people chat, play games, share media, and more, within a virtual environment. Although it’s in an early stage (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his VR goal was 5-10 years away), there are clear dovetails between this system and the new social Facebook Live features.

The virtual reality (VR) market has made significant strides throughout 2016.

New VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive debuted amid great consumer anticipation, while VR content launches kept pace, with Batman: Arkham VR and Chair In A Room garnering encouraging download totals.

At the same time, industry groups and conferences brought developers, investors, and content producers together, helping to further ramp up buzz in this nascent space.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, forecasts shipments of VR headsets to spike by 1047% year-over-year (YoY) to 8.2 million in 2016. This growth will help propel the virtual reality space to exceed $1 billion in revenue for the first time, according to research by Deloitte. Powering that growth is an estimated 271% increase in investment in AR (augmented reality) and VR companies from 2015, according to estimates from CB Insights.

But while 2016 has indeed been an important year for the VR market, it hasn’t necessarily been a big one — at least not compared to its future growth potential.

VR headset shipments will continue to grow in the years ahead, driven by the introduction of new content that will appeal to a broad swath of users.

Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, has compiled a detailed report on virtual reality that explores the highly fragmented and volatile VR market that emerged in 2016, lays out the future growth potential in numerous key VR hardware categories as driven by major VR platforms, and examines consumer sentiment and developer excitement for VR, presenting which headset categories and platforms are most poised for success in the near- to mid-term.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• This has been an important foundational year for the VR market. New hardware and content have brought more options to market to appeal to a wider set of consumers.
• But the growth seen this year is merely a foreshadowing of the future. The highly fragmented VR market today will eventually narrow as the market grows and matures.
• After considerable progress in 2016, the VR market is ripe for transformation in 2017. Developers, consumers, investors, and hardware makers have a host of options from which to choose, each with their own strengths and shortcomings.
• The environment is poised for the first killer VR app to hit the market sometime in 2017, which will be a major catalyst for consumer adoption of VR hardware.
• Not all headset categories and platforms will emerge as winners in the near future. More immersive headsets that offer the best VR experiences are too expensive for most consumers. Alternately, affordable headsets that rely on smartphones as processors offer sub-par experiences that can induce sickness.

In full, the report:

• Identifies the major players in today's VR hardware and platform markets.
• Estimates future growth of each of the major VR categories.
• Explores barriers to mass market consumer adoption for each of the VR hardware categories.
• Considers how developer sentiment is driving the growth of various platforms.
• Assesses how the market will shake out over the next five years in terms of size and the success of various VR hardware categories.

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