By Steven Wise
We’re about to witness a renaissance in live internet video thanks to a convergence of factors, both technological and social. Although live video streaming has been possible for almost 20 years, early live content was largely limited to broadcasting sporting events, where much of the fun is seeing the action as it unfolds.
For most other content, on-demand was a more suitable model, and viewing recorded programming was a familiar consumption model based on the precedent of TV content (other than news and sports). The latency imposed by bandwidth and processor limitations and the tethered nature of internet access, tended to steer content providers towards on-demand.
So what’s changed? In 2016 where mobile internet devices abound, most of us have a camera with us at all times (in our phones), and 4G networks are able to deliver real time video that’s good enough for people to want to watch. Beyond the technical evolution, the way we communicate has fundamentally changed. User generated content and social media have led to new attitudes about the role of real time information and experiences.
Who’s who in live streaming video apps
The release of the Meerkat live streaming video app in early 2015 drew a lot of tech media attention to the live streaming category. The app made it simple to broadcast live video from your smartphone to your Twitter followers. AdWeek credited Meerkat with making ‘the biggest splash in years’ at South by Southwest. Yet, its day in the sun was short-lived. Weeks after Meerkat’s launch, Twitter hobbled the upstart app by severing access to Twitter’s social graph (i.e., Meerkat uses couldn’t automatically connect to people they already followed on Twitter). Almost simultaneously, Twitter finalised the acquisition of Meerkat competitor Periscope.
Periscope, like Meerkat, is a social media app that makes it easy to broadcast your life to your Twitter followers. However, it adds the useful option of saving streams to replay them later. Periscope has been integrated so deeply with Twitter that you don’t have to open or even have the app to view Periscope videos from within a Twitter feed. Viewers with the app can tap their screen to ‘like’ the content, which places heart icons along the edge of the video stream.
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