Making Video Apps Even More Engaging with Chat
A few months ago, Amazon bought Twitch.tv for a cool $1B ($970M to be exact) and Twitter bought Periscope for $86M. Both are live-broadcasting video apps, but they have one other important aspect in common: chat rooms. On these apps, one broadcaster sends out video to thousands, or sometimes up to hundreds of thousands of people at once.
In contrast to TVs, the critical part about these video apps is that the broadcasters can be any user, but they also have a feedback-loop from the audience through chat rooms, making the experience two-way. When the broadcasters start interacting with the audience, the engagement level of the audience is escalated dramatically.
When you watch Twitch, It’s like watching a live-event together, just online. You can see what the audience are feeling at the moment in real-time and join the crowd. One of the most effective way to increase audience participation in video apps is to giving users the channel to express themselves, and chat, by far, is the simplest way to do so.
We’ve experienced what mobile live-broadcasting feels like throughPeriscope. The viewers are usually in the hundreds for a popular session, but due to limited screen size, the chat rooms can be engaging and distracting at the same time.
Afreeca TV, a popular Korean video broadcasting website, displays this kind of effect in massive-scale, and has created many online stars. You can actually witness these stars making mass fortune in matter of minutes during their video sessions. Here in this video, a popular broadcaster Sohee Yoo earned $30k+ in cash in a single broadcasting session, from a fan through digital gifting.
The media industry in Korea took this a step further, with TV shows integrating chat onto their main program. My Little Television, a show programmed byMBC, a national media network, is using chat to facilitate audience participation as shown below:
During the show, the audience can send chat messages to the TV show and the actors receives feedback and get to interact with the audience, making it drastically more engaging for the viewers.
The key takeaway is, if you are building a video app and would like to increase users’ participation and engagement, try to build a chat into your app’s video sections, and oh, I heard SendBird has a great Chat API and SDKs to build chat into your app in matter of minutes.
Have a great weekend folks!
