Facebook Live: Vokle, Livestream and Facebook respond.

Earlier today we told you about Facebook launching a new service for communication called Facebook Live. In the article, it was suggested that Facebook was “taking on” Vokle and Ustream as it was providing services that were very similar to what these two sites already had.

We reached out to Vokle and Ustream for comment, as well as Facebook. Surprisingly, though, even Livestream responded to us. Here’s what we’ve heard:

Robert Kiraz – CEO, Vokle.com:

Though this is a proactive move for livestream, which is powering the live service, there are a certainly suspect similarities to what we’ve been doing since our launch; particularly the “ask a question” and screening features.

However, the scope of what we’re looking to achieve is via many-to-many video interactions and actual dialogue. Our central purpose is to humanize the web and make it a warmer, more personal place – something that appears to be philosophically lacking in this latest alliance.

Nonetheless, it’s an exciting time to be in the live streaming space, and we all look forward to changing the landscape of how people communicate online.

Randi Zuckerberg – Facebook Marketing:

Hi Brad – Randi from Facebook here. I just wanted to weigh in with a few thoughts, since my team worked on the Facebook Live experience. We really view this as a natural extension of the Facebook Blog, a way to communicate with our users more directly and give a closer look into what’s going on at Facebook and the people behind the products. The Facebook blog is currently all static text, and we think engaging with people via video is a natural extension of the material currently posted there. We have no plans to get into content production — all of the content featured on this channel will be about Facebook products, events, and partners who are using Facebook in innovative ways.

For example, America Ferrera is joining us today to talk about how her new movie, The Dry Land, was marketed entirely through Facebook and social media channels, as a way to educate and inspire other indie filmmakers looking to do the same thing.

We worked with livestream to create this experience, after the excellent job they did working with us on a similar experience for our f8 conference.

Hope that helps!

And finally Max Haot – CEO of Livestream:

Hi Max CEO at Livestream. We are proud to be a partner on the Facebook Live project and help Facebook extend the events and community at Facebook HQ to the broader online Facebook community.

Over the past year we have fostered a great relationship with Facebook delivering projects such as F8 Live and weekly projects for Facebook brands and artists wishing to go live on their Facebook page tab.

But to clarify, Facebook though remains an open platform where any live platform (ourselves and competitors) can enable live streaming pages for their customers.

Best Regards,
Max Haot

It’s at this point in an article that I would normally offer a summary. However, I think that the representative parties from each site have managed to do that for me, so I’ll simply leave it at that and welcome your comments.