We broadcast from TV to Facebook Live for 24 hours. Here’s what we learned.

By now, most Facebook users should be familiar with Facebook Live. It’s been used to interview celebrities, take viewers behind the scenes at major events, and, yes, explode a watermelon. We’ve been using it ourselves for the past five months. But what would happen if, instead of a Q&A or interview, we just put our entire 24-hour livestream on Facebook Live? That was the question we hoped to answer last weekend.

When it first launched, a Facebook Live video could only be a maximum of 90 minutes in length. That limit was extended in late May with the Continuous Live Video API, allowing us to try this out. If you want read more about how we actually got our feed onto Facebook Live, scroll down to bottom. For the rest of you, here’s what we learned from the experience.

Viewers Cared

Our biggest fear going into this experiment was that the format just wasn’t right and viewers wouldn’t engage. Several colleagues went so far as to ask why, after we’ve invested heavily into creating bespoke content for social platforms like Facebook, we would put straight TV content on Facebook. ‘Isn’t that a step backwards?’

This is a fair question to ask.

It’s true — videos are more likely to be successful if they’re made for the platform that they live on. But Facebook is a destination that has a many uses for different people.

Not everyone can access YouTube, and country that doesn’t yet block it may do so in the future. Facebook is another way for them to access content. In just about every country, across all social classes, a mobile phone may be a person’s primary access point to the internet. Facebook is where millions of these people spend most of their time. We wanted to make our livestream more accessible to everyone.

Sentiment in the comments sections of all three videos was overwhelmingly positive. Viewers responded to individual stories, started conversations about the topics that we covered, and were excited to see this product on Facebook. (View comments here and here.)

All Facebook Lives Aren’t Created Equal

You know those push notifications that you get when someone goes live? Those don’t happen with a Continuous Live Video and that makes a huge difference. We published three live videos of varying lengths and types over the weekend. See if you can spot the odd one out.

Thursday, normal Facebook Live (90 mins): 461 peak concurrent viewers
Friday, Continuous Live Video (1,440 mins): 23 peak concurrent viewers
Saturday, normal Facebook Live (10 mins): 1,985 peak concurrent viewers

In addition to not getting a push notification, we believe that Continuous Live Videos are not distributed in the News Feed in a similar way to their non-Continuous counterparts. When we started our first stream on Thursday, we wondered how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm would deal with a 24-hour video. The answer, it seems, was simple: it doesn’t.

More People Viewed With The Sound On

85 to 90% of viewers will watch our videos on Facebook with the sound off. That’s why we subtitle. On the livestream, that figure dropped to 68%. Could it drop even further over time? Most likely.

Mobile Viewership Was Severely Hindered

As anyone who has made a 360 video will know, native iOS and Android video players do not play nice with advanced features like livestream. This is no fault of Facebook’s, but it means promoting a link to a livestream on a predominantly-mobile platform like Twitter makes little sense. Viewers either need to be within the Facebook app already or on desktop.

Watch Time Data Was Inconclusive

One of our goals with this experiment was to build an community of viewers who would jump into our livestream and leave it on for 10, 20, or 30 minutes. We have observed this behavior on both YouTube and our website. Unfortunately, when we ended our Continuous Live Video we lost much of our data. This might be by design, but I think was just a bug. However, even if we had it the dataset was too small to yield any conclusive evidence.

Would We Do This Again?

Eventually, maybe. A few things need to change first:

1. We would need a way to notify our viewers that our Continuous Live Video. Without the push notification, people just aren’t finding it.

2. Resharing the link to a Continuous Live Video needs to be more effective. When we reshared ours, it reached fewer than 10,000 people in its lifetime and didn’t really impact viewership.

3. We would need more data. Once the Continuous Live Video ended, we lost most it. If we hadn’t been monitoring it before, we wouldn’t know anything.

The two tests putting our livestream on a normal Facebook Live are promising, but it will take a few updates before Continuous Live Video makes sense for 24 hour news livestreams. For now, we’ll focus our efforts with Facebook Live on other things.

Ziad Ramley works on the social team at Al Jazeera English. You can follow him on Twitter or on Instagram.

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Setup

Getting the livestream to Facebook was easy enough. Using a feed created for us by our Master Control Room (MCR), we connected to a Macbook Pro running WireCast through a Black Magic SDI to HDMI converter. We then output our feed from WireCast to an RTMP server using credentials provided by Facebook.

Once the stream was outputting happily in WireCast, all there was left to do was fill in the video’s title and description. Getting from plugging the HDMI cable into the laptop to streaming on Facebook took less than five minutes.

Note: The first time we did this, we forgot to select ‘Continuous Live Video’. Don’t make the same mistake that we did.

Correction (26/6/2016): An earlier version of this article stated that YouTube was banned in Pakistan. The ban was lifted in December 2015.