Facebook made a big splash into the live broadcasting arena last year which made other competing platforms like Twitter’s Periscope or Google’s YouTube to take notice. It was rolled out gradually from celebrities to Verified Pages and now any person can start a live broadcast right from the Facebook app.
In order for you to watch a Facebook Live broadcast from a person or a Page, you would have either subscribed to see it or might have come across it on your News Feed. Facebook wants to improve on that by introducing a scheduling option.
Only available to verified Pages, Facebook will now allow people running these pages to schedule a live broadcast which can be done using the available publishing tools. You only need to go to your page, select publishing tools, copy your stream details (stream URL and stream key), create the post (add a description) then finalize it by adding the scheduled start time or a custom thumbnail.
Facebook will allow you to schedule a live broadcast upto a week in advance and when the time arrives your audience will be put into a waiting room for 3 minutes before it begins. It is also possible to share a link to the broadcast or embed it onto a website when you schedule a video.
This is a great move by Facebook as they seek to make sure that the user base consumes more Live Video. The scheduled live broadcast feature will now join the other plethora of features that were added to the platform on July for a better experience. The scheduling of live videos will be effected starting tomorrow.