Michael Luisi Explains How Live Streaming Has Impacted Media
On-demand video streaming on platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, has massively disrupted the media landscape, diverting eyeballs away from scheduled programming on television thanks to its convenience and mobile accessibility.
One of TV’s few remaining advantages was its live content, especially sports broadcasts, but even that advantage is withering away with live streaming growing rapidly on several platforms, including Facebook and YouTube.
Successful film and television producer Michael Luisi, who is currently in production on three projects and has severals others scheduled to go to before the cameras in 2020, says live content provides an immediacy that keeps viewers engaged even in an era of short attention spans and unlimited choices.
Statistics from Facebook Live certainly bear that out, as live streams have triple the average watch time than those same videos do once they’ve become archived. Engagement metrics are also far better for Facebook’s live streams compared to its archived ones, with 6x the engagement.
As Michael Luisi points out, live content boasts a sense of uncertainty and mystery that isn’t present in archived videos, as anything can happen at any time. Combine that with live chat rooms for viewers to engage with each other (and sometimes the streamer), and live streams feel far more dynamic and livelier than the alternative.
Among the highly coveted 18–34 demographic, 63% watch live streaming content regularly according to Neil Patel. In a separate 2018 survey, nearly half of all viewers reported having watched more live video content in the last year compared to the year before and reported doing so primarily at the expense of live TV.
Gaming Continues to Dominate Live Streaming
While other live streaming platforms have been enjoying strong growth, they have a long way to go to match the immense popularity of live streaming on Amazon’s Twitch.
Viewers watched 2.72 billion hours of live streams on the platform in the second quarter of 2019, more than triple the hours of live content watched on YouTube. Michael Luisi says that over 800 million of those hours were spent watching people play just four games: League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, DOTA 2, and Fortnite.
Gaming streams have appealed to fellow gamers for a multitude of reasons. Among the leading ones are the ability to learn new secrets, tricks and skills for their favorite games, as well as having the opportunity to check out the games before they consider buying them and to socialize with other gamers.
Live Streaming Sports
Live streams of sporting contests are also finding traction online, with the 2019 Super Bowl setting a record for online viewers, while TV viewership fell by 5%. Still, the 7.5 million devices that were used to watch the game were a far cry from the nearly 100 million TV viewers.
That’s not surprising says Michael Luisi, as the Super Bowl is an event better suited to watching on a big-screen TV with friends and family over. Live streams of sporting events can also suffer from uneven video quality and buffering hiccups that add two layers of major annoyance not found on cable TV, one of the few advantages the hemorrhaging format retains.
Nonetheless, Disney’s sports streaming platform ESPN+ has enjoyed tremendous success, topping 2 million subscribers in less than a year. The platform carries live streams of numerous sports, including baseball, hockey, soccer, boxing, MMA, and golf. ESPN+ will receive a further boost in November 2019 when Disney launches an affordable bundle package that combines its Disney+ streaming platform with Hulu and ESPN+.
While live streaming comes with its share of drawbacks, it also provides an unprecedented way for viewers to interactive with what they’re watching, making it another exciting new frontier in online video and another nail in TV’s coffin.
