Facebook's new content and feature additions for Portal are an attempt to broaden its audience

Facebook announced several updates to its Portal video calling device at its F8 developer conference on Tuesday, reports Variety. The updates include both expanded availability and new features. The Alexa-enabled device will become available in Canada in June 2019 followed by Europe in the fall, support WhatsApp video calling, and be able to stream Amazon Prime Video. This marks Facebook's latest effort to boost Portal, which has struggled to gain widespread adoption since launching in November 2018. In April, the company cut the device's price by 50%.Here's what it means: Facebook's addition of new content and features, as well as its entrance into new markets, will broaden the base of consumers who might be interested in Portal.Entering Canada and Europe will give Facebook access to international consumers. Portal devices are currently only available in the US. Through Canada and Europe, Facebook will gain hundreds of millions of potential new consumers for its device. Support for WhatsApp video calling makes Portal more appealing to Facebook's customers. The addition of encrypted video calling via WhatsApp on Portal devices will likely appeal to the chat app's massive user base — WhatsApp has over 1 billionglobal users and is the company's most popular app. The ability to place secure video calls via a familiar app could encourage consumers in North America and Europe to try the device.The addition of Prime Video will improve Portal as a media streaming device. Portal owners will be able to access their Amazon Prime Video accounts through the device, allowing them to buy, rent, and stream movies and TV shows directly on Portal. The expanded content library beyond its current offering of music streaming and select TV channel apps such as Spotify, Pandora, Fox News, CNN, and Food Network will increase the utility of the device and make it more appealing to a wider audience.The bigger picture: We believe Portal's new features are unlikely to convince consumers to invest in Facebook's hardware in a market dominated by Google and Amazon, especially given Facebook's poor privacy track record.European and Canadian audiences provide Facebook with a large pool of potential Portal customers, but we expect the specter of data and privacy concerns will still suppress Portal's adoption — the company continues to encounter reputational issues surrounding its handling of users' personal data.And despite the new availability of brand names like WhatsApp and Prime Video, consumers are likely already using those services on other devices such as smartphones or smart TVs, and thus might not see the need to purchase an additional device.When it comes to hardware, Facebook is in a crowded market dominated by Google and Amazon, which both offer smart speakers with screens and an ecosystem of smart home devices — Amazon had a 36% global smart speaker market share by sales in Q4 2018 while Google had 30%.However, if Facebook can carve out a share of the growing smart speaker market, it has a lot to gain — the US installed base of smart speakers is set to near 500 million by 2024, up from around 120 million in 2019, according to Business Insider Intelligence estimates.