Facebook, in its drive to respond to the ever-increasing uploading and sharing of social video, has purchased QuickFire Networks, as announced yesterday. QuickFire CEO Craig Y. Lee released a statement on the site’s homepage, stating;
QuickFire Networks was founded on the premise that the current network infrastructure is not sufficient to support the massive consumption of video that’s happening online without compromising on video quality. QuickFire Networks solves this capacity problem via proprietary technology that dramatically reduces the bandwidth needed to view video online without degrading video quality. Over the past few years, the team has worked hard to meet the demanding needs of content creators around the world. Ultimately our goal has always been to provide a premium quality, immediate, bandwidth-friendly video experience to consumers.
Their technology encompasses the transcoding and distribution of 4K video, meaning they potentially also bring higher capacity in that arena to Facebook, to compete with YouTube’s 4K capabilities. However, it may represent a deeper rift in the encoding war between companies such as QuickFire (and, by proxy, now Facebook), adopting HEVC (an evolution from H.264 to H.265 which requires licensing fees to incorporate the encoder), and Google-supported WebM Open-Source V9 format on YouTube.
While the studies go on to prove which is the more effective of the two formats, user-generated video content grows daily. Facebook’s massive use on mobile platforms it was a smart move to bring in technology that can push more video more efficiently, and do it quickly to avoid the buffering lags that frustrate users. Brands have also taken notice, and are putting more content directly on Facebook as well: Socialbakers.com, on their website, notes that:
Although Facebook overtook YouTube in November, the margin was still pretty tight – roughly 5,000 videos. But the gap widened significantly in December in the crucible of the always-competitive holiday season. Brands posted 20,000 more videos on Facebook than they did on YouTube in December 2014.
However, YouTube is still building its channels and “network” content, which is a different use case from the typical short .30 to 5 minutes pieces that are easily consumed on Facebook.
Would you play it safe and put your video on both? Or do you favor your friends and family on Facebook? If you were developing a transmedia story, what would be your preference?
