It seems Facebook wants to get in on the growth of Cord Cutting. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook is working on apps for many popular streaming media players like the Fire TV.
This new Facebook app is one of several Facebook projects aimed at making it a “video-first” company that can compete for television ad dollars. Facebook has been marketing its live-streaming capabilities, testing a new video ad product and integrating more videos into Instagram, its photo-sharing app.
This set-top box app that is under development would a promising route for Facebook to seize a larger portion of TV budgets, the people familiar with its app development said. Facebook has been contemplating some version of a video-focused set-top box app for years, but the effort was revived last summer when Facebook executives decided to double-down on video for the second half of 2016. In October, Facebook introduced a feature allowing users to stream videos from the Facebook app to their TVs through devices like Apple TV or Google Chromecast.
The new app would go further than other set-top box apps that Facebook has developed with companies like Roku, Inc., because one design Facebook was mulling wouldn’t contain any “non-video content,” said one person briefed on the app. The existing Roku Channel allows users to view photos and videos.
“If there’s good video content, you’ll actually watch a couple thirty-second video ads,” one person familiar with the efforts said.
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