There’s something unique about being there, in the moment when something happens. As social networking has become ubiquitous, we have grown accustomed to sharing almost everything online. While the common practice would be posting after the fact, the element of being there has still been left unexplored in the realm of social networking.
We built Air for you to stream live video to the people you care about. We wanted a simple and spontaneous way to bring our friends with us anywhere. Air is for all the times that you wish your friends could be there with you.
On Air, press one button to go live, and instantly all the people you care about are invited to join your stream, and experience a moment with you in real time.
Since live video is a fairly new medium for self expression, it can be intimidating at first. We decided to make the experience fun and approachable by keeping everything live; friends can’t watch your stream once it’s over. It’s an experience that is more honest and unedited, and puts a lot of emphasis on the “now”. However, we still wanted to keep the conversation going, so we designed Flashbacks. With Flashbacks, you can capture images during your stream to create a scrollable-like GIF for friends to see later.
Another challenge was to maintain virality in a live medium. For that, we designed Restream. If something cool is happening live, your watchers can restream your live video to their followers in real time, and bring more friends to join the moment. Lastly we wanted people to encourge their friends to go live again, so we thought about “Encore.” Think of it as a like button that lets you tell a friend that you want to see them go live again. Maybe they ended the stream too early, or you couldn’t be there the first time — Encore let’s you tell them you want to see more.
From our first product, Yevvo, we learned that a live medium is easily conceived as a place for celebrities to entertain their fans. Frankly, we’re more interested in exploring habits that have a larger meaning, and on a wider scale, by creating a place for people and their friends. With this in mind, we chose to make Air an invite only community (for now). We did this to be sure that from the moment you’re on Air, you’d have a friend there with you. You can read more about why Air is invite only here.
Our goal is to build a platform that will let anyone to bring their friends with them, anywhere.
We believe that Air is something truly special and will carve out a new way for people not only to consume content, but rather participate in it.
Join Air, and happy streaming.
Ben & the Air team!
PS -You should follow us on Twitter @onair
