Facebook Live API receives two updates for a seamless experience

Facebook wants you to know it’s pretty serious about Live, and that they intend to establish it as the standard means for real time broadcast with two new updates to the Facebook Live API.

The new updates to the Facebook Live API is meant to help upgrade ‘professional quality Live broadcasts’ to offer a more ‘seamless experience.’ Automated encoder configuration and Frame accurate start times are the two updates as part of the new changes from Facebook.

The Automated Encoder Configuration eliminates the need to constantly fine tune encoder settings for a stable Live Stream, a snag that many publishers have faced according to Facebook.

Facebook Product Manager Supratik Lahiri, and Product Marketing Manager, Chris Tiutan, write, “With this update, the Live API now provides preview, start, and stop states for your encoder, and automatically configures it to the optimal settings for a Facebook Live broadcast, so you can be confident that you’re broadcasting the highest quality Live video to Facebook every time without having to manually adjust settings before every broadcast.”

With regards to the Frame Accurate Start Time update, they further explain the need for it, “We know having a strong start to a broadcast is important, and we’ve heard from publishers that it can be confusing to determine exactly when a Live API broadcast is in fact live to viewers.”

It allows publishers to determine the moment and frame when they want to go live, and “One great use case for this is to implement a countdown clock that signals to the broadcaster the exact moment when a stream is live.”

Publishers that work directly with the Facebook Live API can make use of these new updates, or work with a video solutions provider has incorporated these updates.

Additionally, Facebook announced that they have been working with Wowza, a unified streaming media server software, and delivered these new updates to their live video encoding and delivery solution, ClearCaster.

More information on how to integrate these updates can be found here.