Facebook knows that video content is here to stay and that it’s going to be pretty big in the coming years, and it certainly doesn’t want YouTube to be the sole major online destination for video content. That’s why the company today announced that it has started testing a dedicated video feed with several new features designed to improve users viewing experience.
This dedicated video feed will be accessed through a tab on the Facebook for iOS app, it will be available as an item on the left hand side of the web interface. The feed will feature video suggestions from publishers, Pages and friends as well as the ones that have been saved for viewing later.
Emphasis is placed on content discovery, Facebook can leverage the data it has on users to provide suggestions about videos that they would like the most, enabling it to effectively compete with YouTube.
Sure Facebook doesn’t have the robust community of content creators that YouTube has or the numbers, it’s going to be a long road and the social network is aware of that, pointing out that this test is being done on a small scale and that there’s no assurance about it going public just yet.
Facebook has also started testing out a dedicated feed for online shopping which will display products being sold by partners, Pages and users in one easy to access feed.