Facebook May Stream Music Videos To Take On YouTube

Facebook may enter the streaming world, as suggested by a report that said it may pursue rights to stream music videos of major record labels. The motive behind this plan may be for the social giant to help its Watch tab take on YouTube, which is currently the largest service for streaming music videos on the web.

The company is now negotiating with Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group, the world’s three largest firms. According to a Thursday report from Bloomberg, Facebook has asked for music video rights.

While Sony and Facebook refused to comment on the matter, Warner and Universal representatives did not respond immediately to messages seeking comments.

For a long time now, Google’s YouTube has dominated online free video, having over 2 billion visitors each month and over 500 hours of video posted on the platform each minute. And on this platform, music videos are the most viewed kind of content with most of the top 25 videos that have billions of views are music videos.

Facebook has long wanted the popularity of videos on YouTube and the ads that run with them, so much that the social network introduced the Watch tab over two years ago. Despite its effort with streaming videos on its platform, Watch hasn’t received much attention over the last two years while the company struggled with privacy scandals among other backlashes.

Adding music videos may make the Watch tab more appealing to users while creating competition with YouTube and challenging its dominance.