Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access

techcrunch.com

64 pointsdenzil_correa26 comments

> Of course it’s Facebook’s API and they can do what they like about who can access it

I'm a bit annoyed by this reaction... Basically the likes of Google and Facebook have been abusing it to translate their monopoly in mature markets into competitive advantage in emerging markets.

Maybe it's time that, just like FB and Google are campaigning for the comoditization of broadband, we campaign for the classification of parts of their platforms/APIs as public utility.

At which point, unless you are unsarcastically calling for the nationalization of Facebook, they simply turn the features off.

Well, China already has a nationalised Facebook.

I suspect if Facebook are still around and dominant in 20 years there will be officially-mandated features (not necessarily this one, most likely anti-harrasment or anti-fake-news) or national-level Facebook replacements in many non-US countries.

I hate walled gardens and I'm all for trying to move you and, at least tech friends, to platforms people control.

But the trouble is Facebook, Amazon, Google .. these companies are not only huge, they control distribution networks. Let's look at when Amazon removes a book from their store. Sure any retailer can choose not to supply a book, but when Amazon does it, their distribution network as become so large and central for most people that it does effectively censor the book. There are millions of people who only buy books through their service.

I'm not saying they should be public entities, but you need to be aware of the fact that they do effectively control the flow of information just due to their sheer market share.

"these companies are not only huge, they control distribution networks"

They're huge precisely because they control distribution networks.

"The features" are working standalone products, and the sources of their competitive advantage. There is no reason for them to turn them off.

I'm not asking to nationalise these companies. I'm saying public investigations in the current activities of FB and especially Google, in the light of antitrust laws, are overdue now : just as browsers were the gateway to internet and Microsoft got smacked for it, FB and Google are the new gateways to internet content, and therefore we should acknowledge that public interest should be considered in the way these businesses operate now.

Rather the opposite : start to campaign that corporations in size and influence as FB and Google aren't a public utility, nevertheless they're marketed as being such.

Facebook Live is hardly just an 'API', it's the right to use their paid network to stream video to thousands of people in the world simultaneously.

Live streaming gigabytes per second is not cheap, and its not surprising they'd only want to do it from their own app where they can at least show you their ads to try and recoup some of the cost.

Given the popularity of various photo/video manipulation applications on mobile, I'm surprised by Facebook's decision here. If Prisma had gotten a bump in traction with this, every other video/photo app would be immediately clamoring to add FB Live Streaming to their product. In a year, sending live video to FB would be as common a feature as sending photos to Instagram.

Who gives a shit about cannibalizing live video filters, a feature that had no need for existing other than to create parity with Snapchat's filters, when you could give your pet platform, live video which drives massive ad-revenue, the appearance of ubiquity?

This is a very good point, and shows some small thinking on facebook's part. Let's also not forget that regularly, when Facebook/Google/etc launch a feature which is competing with an existing start-up, the start-up often wins (somebody please give me examples here, I'm struggling to come up with any, but I'm quite sure they exist).

Should facebook care if a 3rd party is implementing a feature on their platform vs them supplying it themselves? Facebook's business model is to get data and sell ads. I don't see how this Prisma's live video would affect either of those things negatively.

Snapchat. Facebook launched a number of equivalent features. None of them got traction.

In other words, FB probably has something similar in the pipeline and the people who wrote the ToS weren't aware of it.

Yep, this is mentioned in the article:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/25/facebook-video-filters/

I'm having a hard time understanding why you'd build up a product as a add-on to or heavily reliant on a closed(ish) platform. You're putting yourself at the mercy of a large corporation, that usually doesn't end well.

I agree completely but that's not what happened in this case. Sending live video to Facebook is just one feature that was recently added to the already popular photo manipulation app, Prisma[1].

1. http://prisma-ai.com/

On the other hand, you get to piggyback on their existing success and popularity.

I was working on a live streaming app and considered using FB but their API docs weren't accurate and when I did manage to get in touch with support their reaction was kind of "oh well." At that point I realized it would be a bad idea to put so much effort into something that could be shuttered by a 3rd party.

For the record, FB live docs are pretty clear about not allowing streaming from mobile devices.

Re-stating the facts of the case for the comments:

- This is a post-processing app. If you're familiar with Instagram, the mechanics are the same: you either use the basic built-in camera, or select an existing photo. Then, you choose a filter, tune the filter, and after some processing, your result is ready.

- The finished image can be saved on the device, or exported directly to Instagram or Facebook.

- Recently, their camera gained a new button, to livestream to Facebook instead. The filters can be changed at any time during the broadcast.

- Facebook has revoked their API access to this livestream feature.

- Facebook is indeed working on style transfer for live video [1].

So this wasn't the case of a third-party app depending on a big platform's APIs and playing within their own walled garden. Rather, it's a related, but different case of betting on the tech instead of the community [2], effectively being a free tech demo and hoping to attract investor interest.

While this may still work, the concept was quickly copied, -- in some cases, deliberately, like in the case of VK's Vinci [3]. In addition, the Prisma founder's previous employer, Mail.ru, released the similar app Artisto soon after, which worked on videos before Prisma did.

[1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/196146247499076 [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/prisma-labs-app-profile-inter... [3] https://www.technohacker.com/vkontakte-launched-its-prisma-c...

This is why, if you do something like this, do it multi-platform. Offer it on Facebook, via your own site, and maybe on some phone platform. That way, you can't be shut down by one vendor, and a vendor may think twice about shutting you down and losing your customers to another platform.

Once again, building on FB api == bad idea.

Sadly, FB has eaten so much of the world - there may not be much of an alternative.

Are people serious about style transferring while live-streaming? I mean it is cool and fun, but isn't it also a distraction once people get used to it?

It's a gimmick that is currently hot, increases usage of the platform, and with most creative platforms could yield a video going viral.

The same argument could be made with photo filters (e.g. Apple building them directly into iOS) but extended to live streaming video.

I didn't even know about "style transfer", is this a big thing in other coountries (as Prisma seems to be Russian)?

Yeah it is. It was a Top 10 app in 77 countries on the App store around its release.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-27/eastern-e...

Interesting, thanks for the link!

i'm doing my masters in computer vision and augmented reality and am really surprised how these apps keep getting really big which are essentially just implementations of research papers that are out there and public. In a way it makes me feel good because i know "i could do that". But obviously the hardest part is having the idea in the first place.

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