Facebook Live has taken off like few platforms before it. One reason for its success was broad compatibility with existing live streaming tools and infrastructure: in particular, any product or service that could send a stream to a standard RTMP streaming server could broadcast to and through Facebook Live. However, by opening up Facebook Live’s application programming interface (API), Facebook spawned a range of integrations that both simplify and enhance its customer’s broadcasts. This article identifies some of the key products and services with these integrations in multiple product categories.

Before getting started, let’s have a quick look at the restrictions Facebook imposes on products and services that integrate with its API, which is shown in Figure 1. The first indicates that Facebook is a jealous master, saying, in effect, that Thou Shalt Not Worship at Any Other Live Platform but Facebook Live. Logistically, this means that if a product or service is streaming to Facebook Live via Facebook’s API, it can’t stream to another service via its API simultaneously and will display an error message if you try. While you may be able to use a tool’s generic RTMP interface to stream to other services, you’ll lose whatever features were integrated into that product or service via other platforms’ APIs.

The second restriction is Facebook protecting its mobile app, which is unfortunate, because as video apps go, the Facebook App is pretty basic. Essentially, Facebook is forcing you to use a lower-quality product just to protect an app that everyone is going to have anyway. As we talk about in that section, there are some workarounds here, as well.