(Paul Sakuma / AP Images) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Over the last year, Facebook has focused on establishing its video platform with a force that's catapulted it to more than 4 billion video views per day as of April, up from 1 billion last September.

And it recently made two major announcements that make it a more serious contender for video ad dollars.

The company introduced a new video ad buying format that lets marketers choose to pay only when viewers stick around for at least 10 seconds, versus any time a video appears on someone's feed, and it plans to roll out a new revenue-sharing experiment that will give a cut to video creators, similar to YouTube's model.

Despite this progress, there are still two big challenges that Facebook must deal with before it can become a true digital video powerhouse.

It's all about the content

If Facebook wants to punt YouTube out of the way to become the "best place to share, discover, and watch videos" it needs a lot of high-quality, original content.

Right now it's struggling with the "original" part. People with huge Facebook followings — including celebrities like Tyrese Gibson and Perez Hilton — have a nasty habit of lifting viral videos from other sites and uploading them to Facebook for their own gain.

Although the social network will remove uploaded content that violates intellectual property rights, it hasn't done much to prevent those ripped videos from being uploaded at all.

More subtle than outright video theft, this idea also applies to clips that contain snippets of copyrighted music. For example, right now Facebook would have to remove a video with copyrighted background music.

YouTube solved this problem with Content ID, a software that monitors all uploads against a database of registered intellectual property and will either remove the content or let the original creator collect ad dollars from it.

Facebook uses a software provided by Audible Magic to identify and remove illegally uploaded videos, but until Facebook releases its own full-scale solution, it can't roll-out a wide-scale monetization strategy like pre-roll ads, without the risk of having content thieves make boatloads of money on other people's videos (which would likely lead to more than a couple lawsuits).

Facebook told Business Insider that as video continues to grow on the site, it's looking for more ways to help IP owners identify and manage potential infringing content, and expects to have more to announce this summer.

"We also have reporting tools in place to allow content owners to report potential copyright infringement, and upon receiving a valid notice we remove unauthorized content," a spokesperson said. "We also suspend accounts of people with repeated IP violations when appropriate."