Facebook is scheduled to live stream around 15 college football games from the Conference USA and Mountain West Conference throughout this 2017 college football season. Okay, maybe this is less attractive and interesting knowing we can't watch our Dawgs take on anyone of our opponents nor any of the Power 5 conferences play on Facebook Live, but this is a step in that direction we all want as college students. Saturday's can be tough if your team isn't playing at home that week. College can be expensive, so must students do not carry a cable/satellite package to watch live television to watch their favorite team play. So we have to resort to going out to eat and spend money (that addressed early, we don't have a lot of) or if you're lucky enough to know a friend that has cable to get our Saturday fix of college football. Well, Facebook has teamed up with Stadium to produce live stream broadcast of college football games through the new Facebook Watch.
Of course, this is directly countering Twitter's effort to live stream Thursday Night Football from the NFL Network of NFL games. We have watched many social networks reach out to counter each other in streaming live sporting events. Twitter started this trend last year with the Thursday Night Football games, but ultimately lost their rights to Amazon for this NFL season. There are many restrictions due to licensing of the sport league and teams, but also due to large TV networks buying the rights to exclusively air many of these games on only their network. Through these limitations and agreements, Facebook was able to come up with producing 15 games in their partnership with Stadium, and using already available Facebook features, making live streaming sports different from their competitors in Twitter and Amazon. Unlike with Twitter, you had to exit the live stream to connect to your 'followers' to comment on plays in the game, or with Amazon, not providing a social network for you to connect to the outside world, Facebook Watch allows you to chat with others watching the game, just as you can now with a Facebook Live video. This exclusive feature will allow for those to connect to one another without breaking feed, to provide instant feedback and opinions to the game.
Even though all of the teams to be featured in this Facebook experiment in sports live stream are not likely to be placed in the NCAA AP Top 25 Poll, this is a breakthrough for Facebook and for millennials, who are moving away from cable packages and towards a la carte TV and live streaming TV. Hopefully this will be successful for all of those involved.
Can't have a college football post without saying, "GO DAWGS!"
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