Facebook said that it was focusing on audio, and it was not lying. The company just launched Facebook Audio Rooms and its podcast service today in the states. For the time being, they’re limited to certain popular figures and podcasts with a more public roll-out in the near future.
Facebook Live Audio Rooms might be Clubhouse’s biggest headache
The launch of Clubhouse caused a domino effect of social media platforms trying to create their own live audio room chat service. Facebook is the first one to step out of the woodwork with Facebook Live Audio Rooms. These are digital rooms were a group of people can have a live chatting session with an audience of listeners.
There can be up to 50 speakers in the room at once and unlimited listeners. Speakers’ icons are pinned up top with large glowing circles while the listeners are in a pool at the bottom. There’s a feature which is the digital version of raising your hand to get the speaker to notice you- it’s a pretty neat feature.
Right now, it’s restricted to a certain handful of public figures like Omareloff, Amanda, TOKiMONSTA, Russell Wilson, and Rosa Clemente. There’s a handful of more people planned down the line. At the moment, there’s no word on when it will be rolling out for the average user. The jury is out on whether this will dethrone Clubhouse.
Facebook will launch its own proprietary podcast service
Along with Facebook Live Audio Rooms, the company is also launching its own native podcast platform. It previously partnered with Spotify to bring a dedicated music/podcast player to the Facebook app, but this is completely different. This is a service that’s distributed and hosted on Facebook.
It’s like any other podcast service where users can record their content and post onto facebook where listeners can find it. Facebook states that it will cache the podcasters’ content on its servers in order to ensure that the content doesn’t violate any community guidelines.
The podcasts will be played through Facebook’s own audio player. This player will be able to play the podcasts in the background and while the screen is turned off. This puts it on the same page as all standard podcast players.
There’s no word on any type of compensation that the podcasters will get from the platform. The small group of public figures and popular pages that Facebook gave early access to undoubtedly got a handsome sum from the company to come on board. When this rolls out to everyone, Facebook may unveil a monetization service.
As with the Facebook Live Audio Rooms, there’s no word on when this will roll out to the general public. Also, for the time being, this is only available to iOS uers. An Android launch is inevitable, but there’s no word on when it will come out.
