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Facebook will now let any camera stream to Facebook Live, even a DJI drone

Facebook will now let any camera stream to Facebook Live, even a DJI drone

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Post to your wall, but from the air

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At the annual F8 developer conference today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be releasing an API for its live-streaming video feature. This will allow developers to build live Facebook video right into their apps. To demonstrate, Facebook showed off a DJI drone, live-streaming an aerial shot of Zuckerberg directly to the social network. It briefly hovered onstage next to the social network's founder and chief, who waved nervously before wishing the aerial robot goodbye.

DJI introduced live-streaming to its drones in the summer of 2015 with the release of the Phantom 3. But that capability only worked with YouTube and and its Chinese equivalent, Youku. Pilots will now have a third option, and it will be a platform with a massive and rapacious audience. Facebook has been pushing live video into people's news feeds, and streams from publishers and celebrities have been getting hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers and tens of millions of total views.

GIF from @kerrymflynn