If you thought the podcasting space was crowded, get ready for one more player as Facebook has entered the scene. Announced today, Facebook has launched its own podcasting service to compete against the other major players. It was only a matter of time before Facebook took notice of how popular podcasting has become and decided to jump in.
In addition to podcasting, Facebook will also offer members access to a live audio service called “Live Audio Rooms.” Facebook originally announced these services back in April 2021.
According to Facebook, anyone who’s a member of Facebook can easily create a podcast in moments. However, the podcast service is only being rolled out to a select few currently. It will be made available to everyone else later during Summer 2021.
The Live Audio Room is similar to that of Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. I currently have the updated Facebook app on Android, and the Live Audio Room option was available to test. In the room, I had the ability to invite anyone to an audio-only session, or I could switch it to live video whenever I wanted. Or I could provide a link to my room, allowing anyone to join. So far I’ve tested this with a handful of issues and outside of some of those people not liking Facebook, it worked without a hitch.
You can schedule when you want the Live Audio Room session to start. These sessions can hold up to 50 speakers and unlimited listeners. You can also collect donations, which will show up during the Live Audio Room session. This will be handle when people are trying to raise donations for worthwhile events. With Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces already out there, it will be interesting to see if people will end up utilizing Facebook’s tools.
While this all sounds positive, there’s also a downside to this: they may retain live audio after it is no longer available or deleted. This is to enforce its policies, which will be done both by human moderators and machine learning. I can understand this, especially if this is to help to solve crimes or other nasty things. At the same time, this is the sort of stuff that got Facebook into hot water, over and over. At the same time, I’m not going to point the finger solely at Facebook as I’m sure Twitter and Clubhouse, to name a few, have similar policies.
The podcasting and Live Audio Rooms are only available via Apple iOS and Google Android, at least for now.
So there you have it, another option for both your podcasting and audio room gathers.
