Facebook Looking to Stream Music Videos

Facebook is considering to add music videos to its news feed. The social networking giant has had preliminary discussions with record companies about licensing music videos for its platform, according to a New York Times report.

Initially, Facebook apparently just wants to test the waters, adding just a limited amount of videos to its news feed, and keeping tabs on their performance until the end of the year. Labels would be able to choose the videos in question, and Facebook share any resulting advertising revenue with them.

Music videos could help Facebook to grow its video views, and in turn steal more eyeballs from YouTube. Facebook is already delivering more than four billion video views a day to its users, and has in recent months put a lot of efforts into further growing that view count as well as ramping up monetization of all of those eyeballs.

Just this week, reports surfaced that Facebook was testing a kind of picture-in-picture mode: Select users are now able to keep a video in the foreground while still browsing their news feed -- something that should bode particularly well for music videos. Asked about the feature, a spokesperson sent the following statement to Variety:

"We've heard from some people that they'd like to watch videos while they scroll through News Feed. We're running a small test where you can create a smaller floating screen which continues playing the video while you scroll through your News Feed."

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on its music video plans.