Facebook Jumps into the Deals Battleground, Bad News for Google and Groupon

Facebook Deals is no secret. We have all seen a Deals page at Facebook for a month now. Finally, Facebook is launching deals as a service in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco. The difference with Facebook Deals, is that it integrates with the social aspect of Facebook. There are individual deals as usual, but you will also find deals that relate to group activities like live concerts.

Facebook has a massive audience, something that neither Groupon nor LivingSocial has. This Deals offering from Facebook is also a reply to Google’s deals offering. Another update that has come with Deals, is that Facebook will use its Credits system to offer the deal to its users. However, these credits can be used once a deal shows up in the user’s newsfeed.

It was speculated earlier that Facebook is trying to be different here by keeping only 30% of the total credit revenue. Though, Facebook has made it clear that the split will not necessarily be a 30/70. Additionally, this deal service finally brings the Facebook virtual currency into the real world.

Facebook has already gathered some partners to go ahead with the Deals offering.

Facebook will rely on its own sales force to find businesses interested in offering Deals. It will also tap other services that offer deals, including OpenTable, which focuses on restaurants, PopSugar City, which tailors offers to women, and Zozi, which focuses on outdoor activities like kayak excursions or wine-tasting tours.

Google and Facebook are fighting head on in the deals space and the parallel launch of their services gives immense competition to this field. Though, as I have always said, more the competition, more the companies are forced to deliver. At the end of the day, the user is the one who benefits.

YouTube Transcodes All new Videos to WebM Format, Re-Encodes Existing Ones



YouTube has already worked on transcoding all videos with the highest views on YouTube to the WebM format. This transcoding covers nearly 30% of all YouTube videos and makes up for 99% of the total views on YouTube. As a rule, YouTube will now transcode all uploaded videos to WebM format too, thereby making the web more open when it comes to video content.
WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term.


The entire video catalog of YouTube is massive, given the fact that YouTube adds nearly six years’ worth viewing time of videos every day. The announcement post also boasts of a new processing infrastructure that effectively manages the load between existing YouTube videos and new user uploads, for transcoding and re-encoding to WebM. This ensures a fail-proof method of encoding all new videos, and updating existing videos in the background as well.

Apart from webM, Google also promises to continue supporting the H.264 encoding for videos. Additionally, it has expressed its wish to develop an HTML5 video player as well. You can opt-in for the HTML5 video player here.

This is a big step for YouTube as it tries to unify all its videos into a single codec. Now that Google videos is shutting down, YouTube can be Google’s focus for video content.