"Livestreaming" has become the all-in-one term for broadcasting live video content, and massive corporations and lone bloggers alike utilize it. The ability to provide content in real time to one's consumers has especially flourished with the explosion of social media: Snapchat (NYSE:SNAP), Periscope, Meerkat, and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) have all introduced live streaming video options in the United States. There is also Livestream: a platform that allows customers to broadcast live video content using nothing but a camera, a computer and the Internet. It then allows viewers to play the broadcasted content via the World Wide Web, Android, iOS, Apple TV, and Roku. The platform offers both multi-tiered premium services as well as free services supported by advertisements, and has thousands upon thousands of consumers, ranging from small start-ups to giants like Spotify, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), SpaceX, NBA, and the Clinton Global Initiative. While livestreaming is a social phenomenon, it has also proven to be an invaluable tool to businesses looking to reach new customers.
"Raw" video can stir more emotions and create a feeling of exclusivity and familiarity in a viewer base as opposed to footage that appears pre-packaged and edited like traditional TV advertisements. A common way to foster this familiarity is to let viewers in on the "creative process" of a business. Restaurants will livestream the goings-on in the kitchen the night of a celebrity visit, for example. A robotics start-up will grant viewers glimpses of their hopeful prototypes. As a result, consumers begin to feel less like consumers and more like participants in the product's creation. Adidas (ETR: ADS) successfully used livestreaming to generate excitement for its products last year, when it broadcasted live video of Real Madrid Star James Rodriguez signing his contract extension with the company. Some companies will even hold live Q&A questions with their customers, or interviews with their employees of CEO's. The goal of livestreaming in this way is to drum up excitement and expectations for the final product, which the company is ultimately selling to its viewers-whether that product is food on a plate, new cleats, or a drone in the sky.
The final advantage of livestreaming is its brevity. Short clips of video and text dominate today's social media. Snapchat, Vine, and Twitter (NASDAQ: TWTR) alike specialize in content that is deliberately condensed. These platforms create a sense of universality in terms of the medium of communication: Nicki Minaj, Hillary Clinton, and your friends from high school can all genuinely use the same social media platform and communicate with one another. And livestreaming allows businesses, large and small, new and old, to try their hand at the very same tactics that have allowed these kinds of celebrities and public figures to reach out to the public in ways that would have been unthinkable merely a decade ago.