Facebook Could Be Already Preparing a YouTube Alternative
- Facebook is securing licenses from big music labels, and some say it’s not about protecting user posts.
- The industry has been urging the social media giant to create a viable YouTube alternative.
- Facebook has also bought a cloud gaming company, so they are about to enter that market too.
According to a story by Bloomberg, Facebook is already preparing a video platform to offer as an alternative to Google’s YouTube. Reportedly, record labels have been asking for this for ages, and Facebook has decided to provide it to the world. The evidence which points to this direction is that the social media giant is buying rights to music videos from major labels lately, as its negotiations with Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group have leaked to the public. Moreover, unnamed sources claim that Facebook has already begun testing a music video service in Thailand and India.
Facebook’s executives are officially playing down these rumors, claiming that the focus of all these moves is Facebook Watch and to secure their users’ rights to upload videos with licensed music playing in the background. Still, the vast 2 billion userbase (and another 1 billion on Instagram) is making the venture of creating a brand new video platform to compete with YouTube almost imperative. Music videos are the main element that keeps YouTube so profitable, as that’s what most people are there for. This makes the aforementioned moves highly targeted, but we can not draw any solid conclusions yet.
On other news, Facebook has bought the Spanish cloud gaming company named “PlayGiga”, so it is obviously planning to enter the cloud gaming scene too. This just happens to go against Google again, who launched Stadia a couple of months back. According to reports that we cannot confirm, the acquisition cost was agreed to $78 million, and the goal is to have “PlayGiga” take it from where the “Instant Games” project left. The Spanish company hasn’t provided many details either, but they stated that they will work on cloud gaming, now with a new mission.
We’re thrilled to welcome @PlayGigaOficial to the Facebook Gaming team. We’ll decline further c☁️mment for now.
— Facebook Gaming (@FacebookGaming) December 18, 2019
Right now, there are 12 actively developed cloud gaming projects, with PlayGiga being one of them. Google has Stadia, EA has Project Atlas, Microsoft recently announced xCloud, Nvidia has GeForce Now, and Sony has PlayStation Now, so all the big players are in the market already. The experts’ prediction on cloud gaming is that we’re talking about a market that’s about to explode, with only a few technical problems standing in the way right now. Latency, effective GPU resource sharing, and distributed infrastructure are some of these problems, and we are close to solving them once and for all.
Are you excited about the future of cloud gaming, and would you welcome a YouTube alternative by Facebook? Let us know in the comments down below, or on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.