Facebook’s new video features should make YouTube really nervous

Facebook wants people to watch more videos on its platform, even if those videos aren’t discovered within your news feed. In other words, Facebook wants to be more like YouTube. And today the company announced a set of video-related updates aimed at doing just that. Facebook’s interest in video consumption first ramped up nearly two years ago when it began auto-playing video within a person’s news feed, and recently expanded to include live video streams from celebrities as well as immersive 360-video. That worked fairly well in terms of serving interesting content you’re likely to enjoy, but the engagement on those videos doesn’t really compare to YouTube. Part of that is because people don’t come to Facebook to watch videos, making viewing times shorter or limited to a single video at a time. Today’s updates want to fix that with the debut of a new “Suggested Videos” feature, which is already being tested for mobile users. When you open a video on Facebook, you’ll now see it playing as part of a new video discovery feed. Once you finish, the basic idea is that you’ll scroll through and perhaps watch a couple more related videos. It’s sort of like how YouTube is successful in getting me to watch 10 minutes of puppy videos when I only intended to consume a single 30-second clip. Whether people will actually find Facebook’s version useful is another question entirely.