Today Facebook launches its full assault on YouTube with a dedicated hub for watching Live and recorded videos in its mobile app. A Video tab is taking over Messenger's prime, the center spot in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, turning Facebook into a destination for discovering videos categorized by topic beyond stumbling across them in the feed.

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The Video hub heavily features Facebook's Live broadcasts, and will roll out on iOS and Android in the coming weeks alongside a slew of Live upgrades including:

Payments to select news publisher partners in exchange for broadcasting on Live instead of their own sites
Live videos in Groups like your family or people with a specific interest
Live videos Events so you can schedule a Q&A or show off a party to invitees who couldn't come
Comment Replays that simulate how feedback popped up during Live viewing
Topic tagging to place your Live video in the right discovery category in the video hub
Facebook's six Reaction emojis that flies across the screen visible to viewers and broadcasters like Periscope's hearts
Five color filters that can be changed on the fly to improve lighting without equipment
Viral invites so viewers can notify friends to join the audience
A Live Map of current broadcasts around the world (Currently on the web only)
Snapchat-style doodling so broadcasters can draw atop their Live videos (announced but not launching yet)
Live video audience metrics including the total unique people who watched a video while it was live, and a chart showing how many Live viewers the video at any given moment
The upgrades leapfrog Facebook Live's competitor Periscope, which is owned by Twitter. They make Live videos simpler to create and keep interesting, more fun to watch in the moment or later, and easier to discover while they're still Live, which Facebook says stimulates 10X more comments. Live isn't a foreign product bolted on, but one that's "leveraging a lot of core fundamentals" of the social network, says Facebook's Product Management Director for video Fidji Simo.

New video destination Android

But the most important change is that Facebook was willing to relegate the oft-used shortcut to Messenger to the hard-to-reach top left a corner of the screen to highlight the Video hub instead. It proves that Facebook sees the video as the future of communication, time spent on its app, and how it will make money.