Live streaming, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter
but one live-stream startup gets it like the others don’t.
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Credit to Whose Line is it Anyway, which is a great use case for this new live stream product’s capabilities. There have already been some improv fans using the platform’s no-delay video format to perform and create together. When I started live streaming on meerkat I had no idea I would end up on the leader board as someone who has made it her life mission to educate people about America’s food system. I guess people really do want to know what’s really inside of hotdogs and chicken nuggets. I am much more comfortable talking about what I do rather than being judged about how good I am at live streaming by the fact that I have 73,000 points as my score at #71 of 100 on the meerkat leader board.
Be known for what you do, not for how many social points you have.
When you meet someone new online, they aren’t going to immediately ask you how many hearts you have on periscope or what your Klout score is, just like they won’t ask how much money you make when you meet in real life. They will ask you what you’re about and what you do. A person may benefit in discovery metrics for how many hearts they have on periscope or if they are on Meerkat’s leaderboard, but if they don’t provide engaging content, viewers won’t come back. It is possible to accumulate enough points or hearts to be recognized as most loved simply by being extremely consistent, especially since mobile live streaming is still in its infancy. It has been proven by multiple users that streaming every and interacting in streams will get you lots of points, even enough to get on the leaderboard. But, where is all of this going? What are the points for?
Gamifying the system is ruining the experience for everyone, especially newbies.
When someone gets on periscope or meerkat and notices the ‘most loved’ people to follow or the ‘all time leaderboard,’ it can be very discouraging to ever have a hope of getting there. This is made worse by the advent of brands and celebrities taking notice of these platforms’ mobs of raving fans who have discovered a replacement for TV that is far more entertaining.
Periscope hearts are sometimes arbitrarily given when someone streams. If someone has a superfan or is particularly attractive, viewers will tap their screen incessantly to give hearts. We have to wonder if these people are really getting anything useful out of a stream or if they are simply engaged by beauty. There have undoubtedly been many impactful streams shown to the world, but the rampant desire to play the game that is so tempting has diluted the quality of content on both periscope and meerkat. Hearts are also able to be hacked and that makes it even easier for someone to pay to be more famous. More famous to only 10 million people, or even less of a user base for meerkat. Periscope does post tweets to twitter to advertise a stream on behalf of the streamer. However, the multiple taps necessary for a viewer to tweet out a stream makes this feature far less commonly used in comparison to Meerkat’s one-tap retweet.
Meerkat quantifies several engagement activities. Points are given to both streamers and viewers for subscribers to a stream, favoriting & retweeting which is tied to the twitter side of meerkat, and for comments on streams. These metrics are also impactful within the meerkat app itself and have a weight to them, as streams that have been liked and restreamed will show up to a meerkat user’s followers in their home feed. This is dissimilar to periscope which allows users to send their followers a push notification to join into a stream. Meerkat’s connection to twitter runs deeper than simply auto posting, favoriting, or RTing tweets that advertise a user’s stream. The ability to post comments which can be tweeted at the streamer allows for more engagemnent after a stream. This provides even more numbers for those who are focused on engagement analytics.
Blab.im is new live stream platform that is making waves in the community. Blab users give props that display only after each blab session and are not tabulated further. It is a quantitative metric only insomuch as there is a number displayed next to what used to be an upvote triangle and is now a “hands up” emoji. It is possible to click hack to give feels on the web version of Blab, but since this isn’t a gamified system, there is very little incentive to do so. Without the number next to the animation, a streamer on blab would simply see a stream of avatars floating up similar to hearts on periscope when they are making a point or someone likes their opinion. If this number were instead something like a life bar from a video game, it would have exactly the same effect, except it would be growing instead of decreasing.
There are numbers, and there are things that matter. — Furqan Rydhan, Blab.im
This is why the interactions of blab are much better. The social interaction itself is what matters most. So far, the only permanent numbers blab has given out to users are their number of days on blab. This shows how many days it has been since a user first logged in to the service. What does matter is engagement and making real connections. Blab itself allows this better than meerkat and periscope or any other mono-vocal live stream. Users are able to have real-time video conversations with no delay and are able to see each other’s facial expressions without any hiccup in reaction time. Blab is attracting users from around the world and just like the other live stream platforms, is helping to unite global perspectives.
The difference with blab is that there are more voices in the conversation. Voices are powerful in sitations where simply typing words in comments are not. On Blab.im, the points don’t matter as a score, but they do matter as an engagement and feedback mechanism. These clicks, which set off an animation visible to all in the virtual room, are telling the person speaking that the viewer understands them or likes what they’re saying, and tells other viewers that this person may be worth listening to. The enjoyment value of blab is seen when users are having a great conversation and enjoying each other’s company and knowledge together.
Blab understands focusing on connective engagement rather than scoring points.
