What Happened
Facebook has officially announced it is rolling out 360-degree videos in News Feed, in partnership with Oculus, the virtual reality company it acquired last year for $2 billion. The launch features content from six partners including Star Wars, GoPro, Vice, and SNL. Last week, news broke that Facebook was reportedly developing a separate app for 360-degree videos, which may still be in the pipeline, but for now,Facebook has made good on its promise from this summer’s developer conference to include 360 video in the News Feed.
What Brands Need To Do
As of now, Facebook is only allowing brands to post spherical video clips organically to their pages, but given Facebook’s heavy push with autoplay videos, it seems safe to assume that Facebook will package 360-degree videos into ads soon. We expect VR to be a niche market in 2016 in the same way that smartphones were a niche market in 2007, but building a library of 360 content which is accessible across devices will allow brands to stay ahead of the curve.
For more VR news coming out of this week’s Oculus Connect 2 conference, follow our coverage here.
Source: AdWeek