Popular American publishing website, recently landed a huge interview with the American President, Barrack Obama. “A sit-down with President Obama at the White House” as Buzzfeed fondly called it, was billed as the POTUS’ “first interview on Facebook Live,” the relatively new live video service that Facebook is promoting.
But, as fate would have it, early in the broadcast, the Facebook Live stream suffered a glitch, and as Adweek reported, almost 35,000 eager viewers on Facebook’s platform were left with images of BuzzFeed legal editor Chris Geidner sitting alone in the White House, introducing the highly-publicised event.
To make things worse for the Facebook Live marketing team, Buzzfeed went ahead and directed people over to it’s rival YouTube, using a facebook post where it was simultaneously streaming the much anticipated interview.
This enabled YouTube to get one over Facebook Live and in the process show thousands around the globe its strength when it comes to live streams, something it has great experience in.
Facebook spokesperson was not available for requests for response over the issue, while BuzzFeed said the company is still assessing what went wrong.
But not all is lost for Facebook Live. Last month on April 8th, BuzzFeed used Facebook Live to stream the video of two staff members explode a watermelon by wrapping rubber bands around it to mammoth 800,000 viewers, and to Facebook’s credit, that stream went through suffering no glitches.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)