Live Streaming – The Next Big Video Content Curation?
We’ve all heard about YouTube, Vimeo, Skype Video Calling, Hangouts (Google), and much more. They all involve some sort content curation through video. With the emergence of social media, more and more users are becoming engaged digitally. With the shift of social becoming more mobile, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have started to shift their focus on mobile video content. Yes, YouTube and Facebook Video are already readily available for mobile, but what about Live Video Streaming? The trend as of late has been just that. Live streaming has become much more of a thing. Of course it has been around for quite some time, take Twitch.tv for example, where it’s an ecosystem for live streaming for gamers. Twitch has taken the gaming world to a whole new level, as it enabled live broadcasts of game play by amateurs and pros alike.
Image via Twitch.tv and Essentialmac.co.uk
However, a new trend has emerged, which is Live Streaming via mobile. A perfect example of this would be the sudden surge of an app called Meerkat. The app allows for anyone with a Twitter account, to live broadcast whatever it is they are doing to at most, 5000 of their followers. This seamless broadcast only requires a solid data connection, and users can share their broadcasts. The app blew up like crazy and now has secured $18 million in funding, giving it a $52 Million pre-money valuation. As Meerkat’s popularity grew, Twitter was quick to jump on the bandwagon as well, acquiring a Live Broadcast app called Periscope. Since its acquisition, Twitter has been heavily promoting the app, even using it to broadcast its latest Q2 Earnings Report via Jack Dorsey (check out the screen shot below).
Image via Business Insider – Twitter Q2 earnings via Periscope
There’s been a lot of talk about why Facebook hasn’t followed suit. Well, they actually have, but are doing it more discreetly. The platform has unveiled live video streams, but for Celebrities only. This is more of a way to monitor the usage and test out its features in my opinion. See the article about it via TechCrunch here. People are arguing that Meerkat and Periscope have too much clutter, and warrants unwanted streams because its open to the general public. Their argument states that because of this reason, Facebook will win. However, I beg to differ. I have Periscope installed and have been using it to view streams of people I want to follow. Although I have not yet live streamed, I am not constantly bombarded with unwanted stream notifications. Plus, you can choose who you want to view and follow. It’s really not that bad and I tested it out on both LTE and Wi-fi. Both times I had no interruptions and seamless streams.
With social media evolving and users being more on the go, I can only imagine it being a matter of time when all brands start using these types of new tools .There are already a number of brands that are using periscope to promote events and their brands.
And with that, I will end this post with a STKR from STKR.us. Keep it cool~!
STKR via http://stkr.us
geeky_yang 