Word of Facebook’s overstated metrics initially resulted in rather damning headlines, including “Facebook overestimated video metrics by 60-80% for 2 years” and even “Is Facebook Video a Scam? Company Busted Over Inflated Metrics”. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) was one of the first publishers to report on the story.

The problem surrounded one of the video metrics on Facebook’s dashboard – average duration of video viewed. “The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video,” David Fischer, VP of business and marketing partnerships at Facebook, wrote on 23 September.

“But it didn’t – it reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of ‘views’ of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds).”

The company apologised for the issues the miscalculation has created for its clients. It fixed the problem and assured users that the discrepancy did not have an impact on other video metrics shared in the past.

Joe Stanganelli, a freelance contributor for the analysis, research, and content provider, DMN, added his voice to a number of others who felt that the so-called scandal was overblown: “The WSJ’s story – and Facebook’s above mea culpa – treated the ‘mistake’ as if it were a crisis. In reality, this treatment is puzzling; not only had Facebook clearly disclosed what it was doing in 2014, but it was also doing the right thing for marketers.”

Better Live video scheduling and a filter-filled future

On to better news, Facebook announced on 18 October that live videos, published by Verified Pages, via the Facebook Live API, can now be scheduled. The company is rolling out the feature in response to publishers’ requests to schedule their live broadcasts so Facebook users know when to tune in.

“Scheduling a live video makes it easier to build anticipation and buzz with your audience before your broadcast begins, so you can start strong with an audience already assembled,” Peter Roybal, product manager, and Brian Lin, software engineer, notedo.

“When you schedule a live video, an announcement post will be published to News Feed letting your fans on Facebook know that the broadcast is coming.”

The feature is expected to be rolled out to all Pages soon.

And as a peek into the future of video, Facebook reportedly demonstrated an unlaunched prototype of Live video filters at the WSJDLive conference, held 24 to 26 October in California.

“If you liked Prisma, you’re going to enjoy what Facebook’s cooking up,” Josh Constine, an editor-at-large for TechCrunch, reported. “Facebook chief product officer ,Chris Cox, demoed an unlaunched prototype of Live video filters that make your footage look like it was painted by a famous fine artist like Vincent Van Gogh.”

No launch date is available for the feature yet, but Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted a video featuring the style transfer-technique that these filters use. The fpcus of this high-tech, breakthrough artificial intelligence-generated video? His dog, Beast.