If you like doing Facebook live videos, you should know about an important change that just took effect on the platform.
If you’re the type who likes to broadcast live on social media platforms, heads up! Meta made a change to its policy on Facebook live videos. As of now, the platform will only store those live broadcast recordings on your page or profile for just 30 days.
At the end of the 30 days, Facebook will delete them.
Meta announced the change on Tuesday, the day before the new policy was set to take effect.
So much for notice!
The change doesn’t apply only to new videos
“New live broadcasts can be replayed, downloaded or shared from Facebook Pages or profiles for 30 days, after which they will be automatically removed from Facebook,” the advisory states.
But then there’s this: “Live videos currently older than 30 days will be removed from Facebook.”
Before those older videos get deleted, Facebook will notify users by email and in the app. At that point, they’ll have 90 days to either download the videos or transfer them.
It does say, however, that they’re launching “new tools” to make downloading previous Facebook live videos easier.
I find that little of what Facebook changes makes things genuinely easier. But maybe that’s just me.
Why the change? I suspect two reasons
Facebook comes right out and tells you that the majority of views of Facebook live videos happen within the first 30 days. From that perspective, it makes sense that after 30 days, the videos might be less useful.
But it doesn’t entirely explain why Facebook wouldn’t still want to offer the videos. After all, even if the percentage of views drop to, say, 10% of what they were during the first 30 days, that’s still video views.
People are watching, even if far fewer numbers of them do watch.
I suspect it comes down to storage space and bandwidth. That would make much more sense in explaining why Facebook is deleting the videos altogether. If storage space weren’t a potential issue, then why else would Facebook even care about when more people actually watch? What difference would it make?
One other note: If your video is set for deletion, you’ll have the option to postpone that for 90 days. Not a long time, but long enough that you could potentially make better arrangements to download and archive those videos.
It will also give an opportunity to make short reels from your live videos. It appears those short reels will last indefinitely, but if I remember correctly, the reels are limited to 60 seconds.
That might not be a bad thing: If a Facebook live went for 25 minutes, there’s almost certainly not 25 minutes of useful content, depending, of course, on the source.
I don’t go live on Facebook and I generally try to stay away from cameras when I can. I certainly try to stay away from video cameras. But if you like being on camera and going live on Facebook, you have a new set of rules that just took effect.
