In February of this year, Mark

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Zuckerberg, returning to work after paternity leave, convened the first Team M meeting. This is an event where the entire global management team — CTOs, product managers, sales — meets to discuss how the company is doing.

That day, Fiji Simo, Director of Product, and Maher Saba, Director of Engineering, talked about the prospects for Facebook streaming and the prospects for Live.

Facebook launched Live in August last year. The service is incredibly easy to use - to list of norway cell phone numbers start broadcasting, you just need to press a button. Initially, streaming was available only to verified accounts of celebrities and journalists, but since December 2015, the technology has become available to all users of the social network.

By February, it was clear that the service was quickly gaining popularity among users. At that point, Facebook had already invested heavily in the project, but it wasn’t until February that the company had a clear understanding of why Live was needed.


“When you release a service, you feel like you’re on the cusp of something special. We all felt that way that day,” Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president of product, told BuzzFeed.

Simo describes this sense of revelation very well. “It was a ‘eureka!’ moment for everyone,” she says. “Mark was like, ‘Wait, if this thing is really that popular, maybe we should put more resources into it?’”

There’s a reason Facebook came to this video format. For the most part, streaming isn’t what you’d expect from the familiar YouTube or Vimeo formats. Live is something completely new, something different. And it’s in demand.

“The big decision was that we focused on Live. Streaming is not the type of video that we’ve been used to for the last five to 10 years,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed. After the meeting ended, he wrote the team a long letter about the service.