Amazon Prime Video, Facebook Live Coming to Facebook’s Portal Device

By Janko Roettgers

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Facebook is giving its Portal video chat device a number of updates that turn it into more of a full-fledged smart display: Amazon’s Prime Video service is coming to later this year, the social networking giant announced at its developer conference in San Jose, Calif. Tuesday.

At the conference, also announced an international expansion for the device: Portal will be available for sale in Canada in June, and in European countries this fall.

Portal is also getting support for additional Alexa skills, including news briefings, and smart home support, all courtesy of Facebook’s partnership with Amazon.

Facebook itself is bringing Whatsapp and encrypted video calls to Portal, and is adding support for Facebook Live broadcasting. The latter will effectively allow Portal owners to produce their own live streams, with some help from the device’s AI capabilities, which automatically track subjects and keep them in focus in its video streams. The company is also adding new ways to look at photos in Portal, and bringing Instant Games and games with augmented reality effects to the device.

Facebook first launched Portal last October. The company has kept mum on the number of devices sold since, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg only saying Tuesday that Portal had done “better than we expected.” Zuckerberg had been equally muted on the device during the company’s recent Q1 earnings call, where he instead painted it as a learning lesson, saying: “Having Portal out in the market has been very valuable.”

Facebook has faced criticism over introducing a smart display with a camera just as it was dealing with multiple privacy scandals. The company responded to this criticism by adding a plastic clip to each device sold, which can be used by Portal owners to physically cover the camera.

The company seemed determined to further address these concerns with the announcement of encrypted video calls. However, the devil is in the details: Video calls to other Whatsapp users will be encrypted right away, but calls to Messenger users will only be encrypted once the company adds end-to-end encryption to Messenger next year.

Still, some of the new features announced Tuesday should make it a little easier for Facebook to position Portal in competition to other smart displays, including Amazon’s own Echo Show. Particularly the addition of smart home capabilities and news briefings should help close some of that gap. Facebook did not share availability dates for those features Tuesday.