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Facebook ups the ante with HBO premieres

Justine Underhill
·Reporter

Facebook (FB) and HBO are teaming up, as the social media site makes a big push into video.

Facebook will stream the premiere episodes of the new HBO shows “The Brink” and “Ballers” for a limited time. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, star of "Ballers,” will host the show on his Facebook page, while "The Brink" episode will be available on the series’ page.

Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task notes that this deal is a win for both companies.

“HBO gets to expose the shows by teasing a couple of episodes on Facebook, which is the biggest platform in terms of eyeballs,” he says. “For Facebook, it's another way for them to test video on the site and work with a premier video provider like HBO. [This] makes people spend more time on Facebook, and [Facebook] is doing an amazing job of monetizing it.”

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HBO previously released premiere episodes of its shows, including "The Newsroom" and "Girls," on Google’s (GOOGL) YouTube. Task notes that video content is growing on Facebook, and this could be a major threat to YouTube.

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“YouTube owned the [video] world for a long time,” he says. “Google didn't do a whole lot to monetize it, and now they're having trouble keeping some of the homegrown YouTube stars happy. That's why they've done a lot of marketing around some of these people…Facebook is serving up all this video and they're monetizing it in a much bigger way than Google has done today."

Facebook’s video platform has grown rapidly over the past year. The site is expected to deliver two-thirds as many video views as YouTube in 2015, according to Ampere Analysis. Currently Facebook and YouTube are nearly tied in terms of audience size, with 1.4 billion and 1.3 billion monthly active users respectively. Task adds that Facebook video has a lot of growth potential.

"[Facebook's] stock is at an all time high this week and it's pretty incredible," he says. "Facebook is firing on all cylinders right now…video is obviously a huge part of the strategy."

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