Facebook will be mostly video in 'a year or two,' says exec

Facebook is extremely confident about its recent video push. During a panel at Variety's Entertainment and Technology Summit, Facebook ad product lead Ted Zagat said that the company expects video to effectively take over the social network.

Facebook's video platform has grown very quickly

"A year or two from now, we think Facebook will be mostly video," Zagat claimed, adding that virtual reality is the next frontier after video takes off. Facebook dove headlong into video in 2013 with autoplaying video, later launching its own player as a means of toppling its main competition in YouTube. The effort is paying off quickly; the company announced in April that it gets more than 4 billion video views everyday. Since then, the company has seen creators and advertisers leverage the platform in droves, well before the company provided robust publishing tools. With that kind of progress, Facebook has reason to be optimistic about how people will use the site in the next few years.

This outlook also means media outlets that depend on Facebook as one of their main drivers of traffic, while already somewhat antsy about Instant Articles, will need to shift into a new video focus if they haven't already. As it happens, Facebook is already providing tools for journalists to embrace the change, releasing the new stand-alone video streaming app Mentions to reporters last week.