Facebook will again be the exclusive social network to live-stream the Oscars red-carpet and backstage coverage but overall, live broadcasts by Facebook's paid media partners have fallen dramatically in the past year.
Facebook will host the live-stream of "The Oscars: All Access" from the pages of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and US network ABC, with coverage kicking off from midday Monday (AEDT).
But live video on Facebook has not necessarily turned out to be the next big thing that CEO Mark Zuckerberg believed it was when he pushed the company to launch Facebook Live two years ago.
Facebook tried to seed the live-broadcasting feature by paying a group of media partners to produce Facebook Live programming. From April 2016 to March 2017, 17 media partners in the program published 1,041 Facebook Live sessions per month on average, according to an analysis by Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
That dropped in half over the next nine months -- and in December 2017, there were fewer than 400 Facebook Live broadcasts among those partners.
One reason: Facebook last year stopped paying media partners and celebrities it had enlisted to create live video programming, a program it initiated in 2016. Separately, Facebook Live became an unwanted flash point when users began using it to share disturbing and violent content.
Facebook insists that Live is actually performing well on the platform, especially among regular users. It says on New Year's Eve this year more than 10 million people worldwide used Facebook Live to share celebrations with friends and family, an increase of 47 per cent over 2017.
