Facebook is signaling that’s ready to spend a bundle on original TV-style content — upwards of a billion bucks in the next year, according to an anonymously sourced report in the Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal also reported that Apple has earmarked $1 billion in spending on original entertainment over the next year. So perhaps the main takeaway here is that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg simply wants the market knows he’s willing to play in the same league as Apple, the world’s biggest tech company.
Whether Facebook will actually shell out hundreds of millions for shows it pushes into Watch, its new video-aggregation guide, is another question. The fat billion-dollar number, supposedly through the end of 2018, “could fluctuate based on the success of Facebook’s programming,” according to the Journal report.
There’s reason to be skeptical about how big Facebook’s appetite will be for funding
