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Facebook Live API Change Has Some Creators Upgrading Their Tools

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Live event producers might find themselves scrambling to make changes this week, as a long-announced permissions change from Facebook took effect. On April 24, Facebook's developer site announced the company would limit the use of its Live API to approved partners starting August 1.

That change impacted several live production tools, and at least one vendor scrambled to inform its customers. Yesterday, Telestream sent out a note explaining that Wirecast 8 or earlier could no longer publish to Facebook with the Live API, so users should upgrade to Wirecast 10.

Facebook has also announced plans to discontinue RTMP support in favor of encrypted RTMPS, Telestream explained to customers. Upgrading to the latest version of Wirecast would solve that issue, as well.

As long as event producers use Facebook-approved partner apps and hardware to manage the pages they stream to this change won't be a big problem, notes Corey Behnke, co-founder of production and broadcast company LiveX. This change was made in the interest of security, he believes: "The overall change was to limit other developers' and apps' ability to post as the user. Ultimately, I think that Facebook is trying to get better control over third-party app developers given the latest scandals that have happened. They hesitated to make this change because the ability for developers to be able to publish_actions as a user was so compelling."

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