Facebook Unveils Chat And Live Streaming Tools After Successful Jonas Brothers Test

By Rick Griffin
Jul 1, 2009 12:39 PM

Facebook has announced a significant set of broadcast and community tools for its publishing platform with the rollout of an embeddable chat widget and a partnership with video service provider Ustream that could allow musical artists to broadcast live footage to their Facebook-membered fanbase.

The tools underwent load testing with a trio of recent Jonas Brothers webcasts. According to Ustream, the Jonas Brothers events logged the following activity:

· 1.5 million unique posts were made via Facebook Live Feed
· 23K average posts per minute
· More than 100K users joined the webcast after seeing their friend’s comment on Facebook
· 974K total unique viewers watched the one hour webcast
· The Jonas Brothers webcast on Facebook surpassed the largest live video event they have hosted for any music artist

While most artists would never approach this level of fan engagement, the webcasts proved the stability of the system and provided a preview of the technology. According to Techcrunch, the streaming service will initially be open to a limited group of applicants. Once approved, an artist can go with a free, ad-supported player or pay a setup fee of $15,000 for Ustream to develop an ad-free player for them. No immediate word on other potential costs.

The chat service, called Facebook Live Stream will operate as follows per Facebook:

“With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends’ home page Streams. Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends’ recommendations. The Live Stream Box includes a tab to see updates from everyone who is posting on the event from across the Web as well as a filter for a user to view just their friends’ updates.”

Again, this provides an opportunity for an artist to take advantage of an existing Facebook-membered fan base to create a community event on their own official website. Per Mashable, Ustream already has chat functionality incorporated into their video stream offering.

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