In this summer's earning call, Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said, “If you go back ten years, most of how people communicated was through text. We’re entering into a period where that’s increasingly going to be video and we’re seeing huge growth there.”

The numbers show it:

• In November 2015, Facebook reported 8 billion daily video views (and in April 2015, the same stat was 4 billion daily video views).
• In January 2016, Facebook announced that 100 million hours of video are watched in Facebook daily.

So the arc of this is very clear.  We started with text and moved to images and now we're heading to video.

In the same earnings call last month, Facebook pointed out that, “people watch video differently in mobile newsfeed than on TV”.  As video dominates Twitter and Facebook, what are the new rules?

Update (February 11, 2016): If you doubted what I wrote below about how captions on native Facebook videos improved performance, see today's news that Facebook is now offering free automatic captioning of "brand" videos.

Did you know you can upload captions with your Facebook native video uploads?

This is a big deal and something you should always do... why? Well, apart from making your Facebook videos more accessible, it'll also increase the video views and engagement on your Facebook native video uploads.

How's that? Well, we live in a world of autoplay video. When someone scrolls through their Facebook news feed videos autoplay-- which is to say, it shows the moving picture but without any sound.  And if you upload a closed captioning file with your native video upload, Facebook autoplays the video with closed captioning display turned on.

This is a major key 🔑!!  With captioning display turned on, your autoplayed native video is more likely to draw in a viewer because the video can be experienced without audio. Here's an example of the Daily Show (a SnapStream customer) doing this on their Facebook native videos:

Last week, Twitter announced support for native video uploads in their API.

We just added Twitter native video into SnapStream (more on this here). For posterity, we documented our experiences and suggestions for improvement (feedback from Jason Baumeister):

As frequent readers of our blog know, we've written several posts about how to build your own digital cable headend (aka a QAM headend). And we've reviewed most of the products in the market, including our favorite the Blonder Tongue HDE-2H-QAM.

The American Journalism Review writes about one of my favorite SnapStream customers: "What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart"

A few weeks ago, I started noticing billboards around town (here in Houston) for a SnapStream customer, the Kidd Kraddick morning talk radio show:

Long-time TV clipping and monitoring service, VMS (video monitoring service) announced on Friday that they've shutdown their service as they file for bankruptcy (chapter 7, evidently). While their website is no longer working, the note on their site yesterday (Sunday Aug 28, 2011) read as follows:

Since our TV search technology is used by a lot of comedy TV shows (like Daily Show, Colbert Report, the Soup, Best Week Ever) to expose the follies of government and media, this news caught my eye:

It's been a while since I wrote about how to build your own digital cable (aka QAM) headend.