Facebook Debuts 'Watch,' Its YouTube Style Original Video Content Portal

Facebook's original video watching hub, called "Watch" is now live for users of the social network in the U.S. on mobile, desktop and Facebook TV, the company’s television style video-streaming service. The company announced the video hub last week.

The content on "Watch" will be both sponsored by the company and also come from its other media partnerships. Such content will be available on the "Watch" tab on the social networking website. Its platform, however, is currently sparsely populated with content such as "American Gothic is Overrated" made by Vox Media, but is expected to have more content soon from established publications such as National Geographic.

The most important thing about "Watch" is that it might change the existing Facebook video setup. Currently, Facebook videos pay in a haphazard manner rather than in a regularized like YouTube does.

While U.S. based Facebook users will be able to watch such content in the "Watch" tab in the mobile navigation bar, the date of the global rollout hasn't been announced yet.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook has planned to create a YouTube-style content ID system, which will also help users use licensed music and lend a cut of monetization to music labels, instead of just taking down the videos as they currently need to because of takedown notices.

However, unlike YouTube, Facebook is banking more on featured content rather than basic user-generated video content. It will offer sections such as “Today’s Spotlight”, “New This Week”, “Popular Now”, “What Friends Are Watching”, “Most Talked About”, “Suggested For You”, and a special “10 Minutes Or More” section for longer videos.

For avid video watchers, the expectation would be more like reality shows rather than regular soaps, since the former are cheaper to make and test on the Facebook "Watch" platform.

Currently, there has been no news of big stars signing up or large budget cliff-hangers being made.

Facebook has been late to the game and it seems that the company has only gotten interested in the video business after the success of Facebook Live. It competes with the likes of YouTube, Netflix and others. The social networking website is banking on its user base of around 2 billion users for its success.

Why Facebook is opting for such a platform now is because video content might be able to generate more income for the social network as this kind of video content might be more attractive for advertisers — the social network is offering 55 percent of the revenues being generated from such videos to content creators.

Its offerings might be late to the scene but that is not what will determine their success. Rather, what could determine the success of such offerings would be whether consumers go to an integrated video platform inside a social networking website such as Facebook or go to specialized video platforms such as YouTube and Netflix for their requisite video content.

It remains to be seen how the platform will perform.