“We don’t want people to use Facebook to watch movies or read newspaper article,” the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg surprisingly declared in an interview she and Mark Zuckerberg gave to Charlie Rose. Before the show is broadcast tonight in the US, we decided to take a closer look at this vision and what it means.
Sandberg’s declarations can be quite surprising considering recent developments at Facebook: haven’t film studios like Miramax and Warner Bros started to make full-length films available on the platform?
However, paying close attention to Facebook’s toppers reveals that content is not what their company is after – at least not per se. Says Sandberg: “We don’t care where you watch.” So what is Facebook interested in when building ties with film studios and media companies? It turns out to be the same as always: “share.”
“We want Facebook to be how people share wherever they are,” Sandberg detailed. In other words, Facebook isn’t about to become the next YouTube, and will keep on focusing on its core social function.
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As for the content itself, it will come from partners, with partnerships playing a key role in Facebook’s strategy (see our other post ‘Zuckerberg: Facebook’s platform is now to be a “partnership company.”‘)
At the moment, “the biggest movie companies that are building on top of [Facebook’s] platform are Netflix and Hulu,” Zuckerberg declared. What Facebook does, which is described as “really powerful,” is to let people share the TV shows and films they like – but once they do, Hulu and Netflix are only one click away.
What do you think of Facebook’s content strategy?
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