Let’s All Stream a Little Stream
We have a few players in the live streaming game, but what game exactly are they playing?
“Holy crap, I'm making a sandwich! I better stream this out to as many people as possible that have nothing better to do than watch me slather mayonnaise all over this rye bread!”
This might not be the first option that passes through your mind when using a live streaming app, but believe me, it’s going through someone's. The recent surge in mobile streaming has seen these apps utilized during conferences, mellow walks through parks, dinner preparation, and most notably an overpriced hugging match. The one thing that all of this randomness has in common, is getting a brief glimpse of life and the world around us through someone elses eyes.
Lets take a look at what we're getting ourselves into.
Periscope
“Periscope lets you broadcast live video to the world. Going live will instantly notify your followers who can join, comment and send you hearts in real time. The more hearts you get, the higher they flutter on the screen.”
Periscope has an aesthetic and UI that creates an ease of use that's also not bad to stare at for awhile. Like what you see streaming? Just keep hitting the hearts and everyone will recognize just how elated you are watching some Dachshunds butt while their owner cruises around the streets of NYC looking for a Starbucks. Having Twitter in its corner will certainly help in the long run budget wise, but they also appear to be a stealthy team of developers with no plans to open the API to a third party any time soon. It’s been “coming soon to Android” for the past two months but just recently offered an email form after streams to be notified of the release. I personally have very few issues while using periscope although many users have quite the contrary to say about their experience.
Stre.am
Available on iTunes and Google Play
“Life is, and should be, unscripted. Stre.am encourages users to share moments, and not memories. From street soccer in Madrid to local band practices, users from around the world share unique moments every day.”
For being the lesser known of these three, Stre.am quite possibly has the best understanding of what people want instead of telling them what they want. For starters it streams in landscape instead of the self inflicted concussion induced by vertical filmography. While watching streams, you also have the option to choose one or the other based on your comment reading preference. With Stre.am not having the massive user base of a hundred-thousand people trying to get stream famous, it has become more of a community of unlikely friends sharing their personal stories. You could literally take ten streamers and have a cast for Suicide Squad and it would be believable. Finally this is on both major OS and works close to flawless which seems an impossible task for the other two.
Meerkat
Available on iTunes and Google Play
“Meerkat allows you to live stream video from your phone to all of your Twitter followers at once. Press ‘Stream’, and instantly your live video stream shows up in your follower’s Twitter feeds.”
Meerkat was the first of this new batch of streaming apps I started using right after the massive hype of SXSW. It didn't matter if I was on my iPhone or iPad, it just worked seamlessly without all the bells and whistles expected from apps these days. Meerkat had this shiny new social platform on lockdown and they would surely come away on top, until the “Android Beta Debacle”. My daily driver is a LG G3 so I was more than happy to get in on this action. I'm not sure what happened, but it seemed as if they just pushed out a pre-alpha “I’m just going to boil this linguine for two minutes” version.
I couldn't get a stream to last more than four seconds through six versions. That really is the main concept behind the app right? Were they trying to beat Periscope just to say they stuck their flag on Android first? The latest update 1.0.2 has vastly improved on many issues but still leaves the concern of what was behind the team's choice of forcing out a clearly subpar shell of its iOS counterpart.
Social Media, Content, and Marketing Live Streams
At this point it’s anyones guess as to which direction this type of media will take us after throwing advertising, marketing, and promotions in the mix. People are streaming to not only let people live vicariously through them, but also share a bit of themselves with the world. Pubs have iPads set up on the bar as people watching from all over participate in a friendly trivia night just by commenting. The fashion industry is using it to give us a backstage pass to an event we could never imagine attending. Live streaming is hardly a new idea, but it’s quite possibly the next way we communicate and share experiences with each other in this FoMo generation we’re in.
