Facebook has got us all to share text posts and photos, and is seeing a lot of use of video.
Now, it wants to turn is all into live streamers, and use advanced technology to aid our use of our phone cameras: That's the gist of an outlook that Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox gave at the Wall Street Journal's WSJ.D Live conference in California on Tuesday.
Cox said that Facebook has already seen 400 per cent growth in live streaming since opening it up to all of its users in May.
Not all of that is coming from users watching broadcasts of major media brands, he explained, adding that the number of small broadcasters - teenagers that stream to just a dozen of their friends - was a surprise even to Facebook itself.
Key to Facebook Live's future growth will be technology that adds to the live broadcast experience, said Cox. He showed off one example that Facebook is currently experimenting with in the lab: an app that automatically takes the camera input and in real-time renders it in the style of famous painters like van Gogh using neural networks.
The bigger idea behind experiments like this is to turn the camera into an advanced tool that unlocks live streaming and augmented reality experiences, said Cox. "This is going to help take the technology to the next level."
