'Facebook is building tools & partnerships to better connect people with the TV programming they love'

Every day, around the world people are connecting on Facebook about shared interests with their friends, family and colleagues. Some of these connections happen as public conversations while others take place just between friends. On Facebook, people have the control to decide what they want to share and with whom they want to share it. We've consistently observed that a lot of what people are talking about on Facebook is related to their favorite TV shows. For example, during last week's finale of Breaking Bad, over 3 million people generated 5.5 million interactions on Facebook. And when Andy Murray became the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years, there were 29 million interactions on Facebook about the event. These are huge audiences, and we're humbled to be helping so many people share and connect with one another.

Recently, we've introduced a series of new products that enable more people to connect with public conversations that are happening on Facebook. Products like hashtags, embedded posts and trending topics are facilitating this activity on Facebook and allowing more people to discover and participate in content that is interesting and relevant to them. Several weeks ago, we announced the initial Beta of two new APIs to make it easier for content producers to integrate public conversations on Facebook into their shows. The Public Feed API is a real-time feed of public posts to pull out and feature in broadcasts. And the Keyword Insights API allows our partners to search Facebook posts for a specific term and understand basic demographic information, including gender, age and location.

Today, at the global television conference MIPCOM in Cannes, we're pleased to announce that we are extending our Beta to new partners who will being using our APIs in their programming across France, Germany, Brazil, Canada and India. These partners will be able to highlight public posts of real-time activity on Facebook about topics related to their shows, and measure the engagement around keywords from their programs. Since Facebook is a platform based on real identity, they can also understand the basic demographics and location of the people that are posting this content, in an anonymized and aggregated format. In the old days, people would gather around the office water cooler to discuss what they watched on TV the night before. Today the water cooler is online, and on Facebook. We're focused on building tools and partnerships to better connect people with the TV programming they love, and we're excited to continue expanding our partnerships around the world to support this effort.