Facebook Inc has signed deals worth more than $50 million with media companies and celebrities to create videos for its live-streaming service.
Facebook has signed nearly 140 deals, including with CNN, the New York Times, Vox Media, Tastemade, Mashable and the Huffington Post, the Journal reported on Tuesday, citing a document. Comedian Kevin Hart, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, wellness guru Deepak Chopra and NFL quarterback Russell Wilson are among the celebrities that Facebook has partnered with.
“We have an early beta program for a relatively small number partners that includes a broad range of content types from regions around the world,” Justin Osofsky, the vice president of global operations and media partnerships at Facebook, said in an email.
“We wanted to invite a broad set of partners so we could get feedback from a variety of different organization about what works and what doesn’t,” he added.
The document shows that Facebook’s deal with online publisher BuzzFeed has the highest value at $3.05 million, the Journal said, followed by the New York Times at $3.03 million and CNN at $2.5 million
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After a live video is over on Facebook, it is stored so Facebook users can watch it later. About two-thirds of the watch time for a Facebook live broadcast happens after the fact, Facebook executives say. Live videos are intended to be exclusive to the Facebook Live platform. Based on early testing, Facebook has said it found that the average user watches live video three times longer than other types of video.