Up Periscope

TVB Europe

Is Now-casting the future of live?

Broadcasters managed to stave off the early threat from online video by offering something that YouTube, Netflix or Facebook could not; namely, coverage of live water cooler events. Indeed, TV viewing of live and recorded programming has increased as a result of incorporating interactive, promotional and companion apps on smartphones and tablets.

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TV's long term hold on live may, however, be numbered or at least forced to adapt once more. The rollout of 4G networks and WiFi as utility means the broadcast experience is being reinvented for mobile. Global events like the Olympics or World Cup have reached a tipping point in consumption on digital platforms where viewers can access on-demand clips, scroll backwards during live play and direct their own multi-camera coverage.

The buzz around live streaming sites and social media apps is indicative of this trend. The poster child is Twitter's Periscope but it is far from alone. Services like Livestream, Bambuser, Ustream, SnapChat and Qik pre-dated Periscope which launched in March to nip the sudden growth of rival streamer Meerkat in the bud.

Hang w/, which promotes itself with celebrity endorsements, is a more established app with a million users and just launched on the Apple Watch. Vine has 40 million registered users with user-created videos limited to six seconds. YouNow claims 150,000 broadcasts daily and 100 million user sessions per month.

Users of these sites are predominantly young. YouNow, for example, says 70 per cent of its users are under the age of 24. Research by TNS indicates that over 50 percent of us engage in other digital activities while watching television. When mobile video viewers do watch traditional TV, 22% are regularly doing so while watching video simultaneously on their phone, states an IAB report in June. What's more, mobile screens are regularly being used for streaming longer-form video, the IAB found.

“If broadcasters ignore live streaming platforms they will be stuck in the one-size-fits-all television model of yesterday, and their products will be less valuable to the consumer of tomorrow,” warns Stephen Smith, CTO, Cloud Technologies, Imagine Communications. “Content owners, distributors, and others in the media industry are faced with three different responses to these new threats: they can ignore them, fight them, or embrace them.”

Digital marketing firm, Greenlight suggests that one in five marketers plan to use live streaming apps like Periscope in campaigns this year. Traditional media is not closed to experimentation. US chat show hosts Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon have incorporated the new live streaming apps into rehearsals and on-air monologues; Major League Baseball reporters are live streaming MLB practice sessions; a ceremony at Twickenham to mark 100 days until the 2015 Rugby World Cup aired on Periscope. When Snapchat announced its Discover channel in January, the brands that dominated its lineup were National Geographic, CNN, Comedy Central, and Vice.

“Television networks could exploit these new technologies to deepen their relationships with viewers and move from digital cable to smartphones,” reckons Om Malik, partner at investment firm True Ventures and founder of online publisher Gigaom.

Social media–centric news

Meerkat and Periscope are groundbreaking in their use of the real-time Twitter timeline as the key mechanism to drive tune-in to a live stream. With both apps you initiate a live broadcast on your mobile, type in a few words about what the viewer is about to see, and enable that text (plus a link) to be shared to Twitter. If a person is already following you on the app, they also can get notifications that you are broadcasting via iOS notifications.

The fact that anyone, anywhere can now upload footage of a live event or breaking news story mean Twitter via Periscope could become a 24/7 rolling news channel. Again, it is the demographic that matters.

Business Wire revealed that 60 percent of millennials in the US depend on social media to keep up–to–date with current affairs, preferring to visit BuzzFeed and Huffington Post rather than traditional news outlets. Sky News suggest that only 18 percent of 16-24 year olds in the UK trusted mainstream media to provide them with relevant information. The online only Vice News launched on last year and has since become the fastest growing news site on YouTube.

Publishers and newscasters have dabbled. During the UK general election in May, The Economist used Meerkat to explain deflation and Sky News journalist Joe Tidy used Periscope to get a behind the scenes look at the first leaders' debate. He also used the chat and 'love heart' functions (which rate a broadcast's popularity) to encourage 200 viewers to post questions, comments and reactions.

According to the The Wall Street Journal viewership of its live video stream is much higher than traditional cable networks through syndication with other sites who repost the videos. Presence on social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Periscope and others contribute to the increased number of viewers.

One advantage that live streaming has over conventional broadcast news is the instant conversational element that viewers can have with the broadcaster themselves. Each YouNow broadcast, for example, features a window where the broadcaster livestreams themselves, and a chat window, where users interact with broadcasters.

"The fact that the camera faces in as default, not out, suggests how valuable we believe conversation is to the success of this format," says David Pakman, a partner at YouNow investor Venrock.

The latest iterations of live streaming services are limited. There's no search function in Periscope, for example, and you can only shoot in portrait mode, making the video unsuitable for the 16:9 standard screen aspect ratio (though this development is coming).

The time window to rewatch video could extend back further than 24 hours when the content deserves it. A fast-forward function would help, as would crowd-sourcing live clips of the feed for broader social distribution. Such criticisms seems churlish for an app developed barely 18 months ago and now with Twitter's R&D team working on it 24/7.

Subhead: Piracy

Live streaming has already gained notoriety for being hijacked by pirates. HBO issued takedown notices to Periscope after it was used to broadcast the fifth-season premiere of Game of Thrones and courted further controversy when used as an illegal platform for the streaming of the Mayweather Pacquiao boxing match in May. Anti-piracy specialist KLipcorp suggest up to 750,000 pirate viewers watched the fight in Europe alone. The pay-per-view to watch cost $99 but the fight had to be delayed 45 minutes while rights holders like Comcast and HBO caught up with last-minute orders. In the interim, more people piled into illegal views of the contest apparently unconcerned about the sub-HD quality of the video.

When asked about the controversy surrounding the Mayweather Pacquiao fight, Twitter's then-CEO Dick Costolo likened Periscope’s effect on live events to that of fantasy sports on live sports. In his opinion it will ‘surround and amplify’ those events, rather than enable piracy or theft.

The EPL currently restricts Sky and BT from broadcasting live games to the mobile devices of fans in stadiums but how can sports organisations like them stop a stadium full of fans with phones live streaming? The answer is not to treat Periscope like Napster but to take advantage of the engagement with the team or sport it brings.

“The industry needs to stop looking at Periscope as a piracy issue,” declares Smith. “It’s a business model that we are not taking full advantage of at the moment. It’s also an opportunity to reach people who are priced out of certain events, or do not consume content because they cannot get it on their preferred platform. If we can fix these issues, I would argue that we would fix the majority of the piracy problem.

He argues that by augmenting a broadcast with multiple types of content and viewing options, media companies can provide a tiered experience that can be monetized accordingly, “taking advantage of audiences with different ideal price points.”

YouNow offers one monetization model. Users can buy into Bars, a virtual currency which they can exchange for a number of 'thumbs up', to tip their favourite broadcaster and help them trend. YouNow takes a cut of these in-app purchases and says that many of its 'broadcasters' make more revenue than they do on YouTube.

Smartphones bring immediacy, and engagement to the traditional ways of consuming video at a pace which could leave TV behind. This is the most important implication of the rise of Periscope et al. Having made live streaming by mobile so easy the nature of live has changed for good. Live is no longer a passive experience but a shared one in which interaction can be realtime.