Live streaming
Livestreaming, live-streaming, or live streaming is the streaming of video or audio in real time or near real time. While often referred to simply as streaming, the real time nature of livestreaming differentiates it from other forms of streamed media, such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos.
Livestreaming services encompass a wide variety of topics, including social media, video games, professional sports, and lifecasting. Platforms such as Facebook Live, Periscope, Kuaishou, Douyu, bilibili, Youtube, 17 include the streaming of scheduled promotions and celebrity events as well as streaming between users, as in videotelephony. Livestreaming 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. Live coverage of sporting events is a common application.
Chat rooms are a key feature in livestreaming, allowing viewers to interact with the broadcaster and join ongoing conversations. These rooms often include emojis and emotes as additional communication tools.
Metrics[edit]
With livestreaming becoming a financially viable market, particularly for esports, streamers and organizations representing them have looked for metrics to quantify the viewership of streams as to be able to determine pricing for advertisers. Metrics like maximum number of concurrent viewers, or number of subscribers do not readily account for how long a viewer may stay to watch a stream.[45] 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 afterwards, divided by the number of minutes that were broadcast. The AMA is comparable to the same metric that the Nielsen ratings for tracking viewership.
This also makes it possible to combine standard broadcast and streaming routes for events that are simulcasted on both forms of delivery to estimate total audience size[46] Major events with reported AMA include streamed National Football League games; for example, the average AMA for NFL games in 2018 ranged from 240,000 to 500,000 across streaming services,[47][48] with the following Super Bowl LIV having an AMA of 2.6 million.[49] In comparison, the esports Overwatch League had an average of 313,000 average minute audience during regular season games in its 2019 season.[50]
Research[edit]
Live content streaming has been the topic of numerous papers examining ways to cultivate online communities through live interaction and increase attendance numbers with engaging content.[58] The livestreaming platform Twitch is a common focus among researching trying to transfer its user engagement success to other applications such as improving student participation and learning in massive open online courses (MOOCs).[59]
