Live streaming
Live streaming is streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real-time over the internet. It is often referred to simply as streaming. Non-live media such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but not live-streamed. Unlike previous streaming services (such as TV and YouTube), live streaming provides real-time human interaction between live streamers and viewers, facilitating their ability to interact with each other.[1]
Description
Livestream services encompass a wide variety of topics, from social media to video games to professional sports. Live coverage of sporting events is a common application. Platforms such as Facebook Live, Periscope, Kuaishou, Douyu, bilibili, and 17 include the streaming of scheduled promotions and celebrity events as well as streaming between users, as in video telephony.[2] Sites such as Twitch have become popular outlets for watching people play video games, such as in esports, Let's Play-style gaming, or speedrunning and are now broadening, with a category called "Just Chatting" usually having the most viewers.
Interaction
User interaction via chat rooms forms a major component of live streaming. Platforms often include the ability to talk to the broadcaster or participate in conversations in chat. Many chat rooms also consist of emotes which is another way to communicate with the live streamer. In the field of social media, the term "live media" refers to new media that use streaming media technologies for creating networks of live multimedia shared among people, companies, and organizations.[3]
Metrics
With live streaming becoming a financially viable market, particularly for esports, streamers, and organizations representing them have looked for metrics to quantify the viewership of streams to be able to determine the price for advertisers. Metrics like the maximum number of concurrent viewers, or the number of subscribers do not readily account for how long a viewer may stay to watch a stream.[4] The most common metric is the "Average Minute Audience" (AMA), which is obtained by taking the total minutes watched by all viewers on the stream during the streamed event and for 24 hours afterward, divided by the number of minutes that were broadcast.
Research
Live content streaming has been the topic of numerous papers examining ways to cultivate online communities through live interaction. The live streaming platform Twitch is a common focus among researchers trying to transfer its user engagement success to other applications such as improving student participation and learning in massive open online courses (MOOCs).[5]
