Facebook launches live events app Venue
Facebook’s new product experimentation team (NPE) has launched a new live event-focused app, Venue, a second screen for fans and expert commentators to discuss events in real time.
The release of Venue comes days after Facebook announced Collab, a short-form music video app that allows users to overlay as many as three recordings at a time to create remote musical collaborations.
Described as “the companion app to live events”, Venue acts as an interactive second screen for fans to comment on live events and engage with others watching.
Expert commentators such as journalists, artists, athletes or aspiring “fan-analysts” will host an in-app “venue” for any given event, providing commentary, posting interactive questions and polls and initiating short chats around specific moments.
Fans can join multiple “venues” to get different perspectives on the same event.
Facebook has launched a new live event-focused app, Venue, a second screen for fans and expert commentators to discuss events in real time
Notifications are sent out when a new “moment” is created, a short-lived digital opportunity for fan engagement at particularly interesting or memorable points in an event.
The idea, according to Facebook, is to facilitate a more efficient division of attention between the event and online commentary, as fans can “stop scrolling or searching to find the exact moment everyone is reacting to”.
Initially focusing on sporting events, Venue has partnered with the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (Nascar), making its debut alongside the Supermarket Heroes 500 race on Sunday (31 May).
Venue is available on iOS and Android in the United States. As with all NPE apps, Venue is experimental and subject to change.
Facebook, along with Instagram, is among social media platforms to increase opportunities for artists to monetise live streams during lockdown, allowing acts to charge for access to online performances and enhancing its tipping tool.
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New Who song streaming exclusively in Music Walk of Fame app
On Tuesday (19 November), the Who became the first artists to receive a stone on the new Music Walk of Fame (MWOF) on Britannia Junction in Camden, London. The legendary British band, who were presented with their stone by Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, are also airing their latest single, ‘I Don’t Wanna Get Wise’, exclusively through the MWOF app.
The premiere of the new song – which comes over two weeks before the release of their 12th studio album, Who – is “the first taste of exclusive content that will become a characteristic of the official app”, according to its developer, Second Screen, which has also created festival apps for the likes of Boardmasters, Sound City, Neighbourhood Weekender, Notting Hill Carnival and Liverpool Psych Fest.
The MWOF app already houses a map of Camden with interactive points of interest marked as series of pins.
It will also incorporate augmented-reality (AR) technology triggered by each MWOF stone (the Who’s is outside Camden Town tube station), with more AR experiences set to be added as more stones are laid.ed in a series of insightful pins.
The Music Walk of Fame app is available to download for iPhone now, with the Android version set to follow in the coming weeks.
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