Facebook launches Venue, a new companion app for live events

Facebook has launched a new experimental application called 'Venue' which is aimed to make live events more interactive for viewers. The application is available for both iOS and Android users in the US.

With Venue, viewers will have an additional screen where they will see curated content from experts. To begin with, the Venue will focus on live streams of sports events. NASCAR is the first sports partner for Facebook’s new Venue platform.

“Expert commentators — well-known personalities, such as journalists, current or former athletes, or aspiring “fan-analysts” — host a venue for each race. During the race, they’ll provide commentary, pose interactive questions and polls, and open up short chats, all around the specific moments in the race. Think of commentators as personal concierges for the main event,” said Facebook in a blog post.

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According to Facebook, the Venue app has been designed in a way that fans can simultaneously focus on the live event as well as their phones. Commentators can set up Moments to engage with viewers. Fans receive a notification whenever a Moment is created for the event. This will allow fans to instantly search the important moments in an event, according to the company.

As The Verge reports, Facebook’s Venue seems to be another effort by the social media company to overtake Twitter for conversations around any live event. On Twitter, users can participate in a conversation using a specific hashtag. The discoverability of such conversations is also much better on the micro-blogging platform. Facebook’s Venue, however, focuses on a curated experience.

Interestingly, the Venue is the third application released by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team this week. Earlier, the team has launched a TikTok-inspired Collab app, and a voice calling app called Catchup.