What it Will Take to Claim the European Live Streaming Market
A couple years ago, live streaming was mainly a phenomenon found in Asian countries like Korea, Japan, and China. Fast forward to today, and mobile entertainment live streaming apps are cropping up in regions all around the globe from North America and the Middle East, to India and Southeast Asia. Yet somewhat surprisingly, it appears that the European live streaming market remains largely untapped for IRL, or “In Real Life,” content.
Current state of the European live streaming market
Europe isn’t completely void of entertainment live streaming apps, but there seems to be no clear market leader either.
The video game live streaming platform Twitch has a strong presence in Europe, and will even be holding its first ever TwitchCon Europe in Berlin this spring, however, similar to the U.S., the majority of Twitch’s European users appear to be focused on gaming live streams as opposed to IRL content.
Besides Twitch, other platforms in the space include Line Live, YouNow, and newcomer LOVOO.
In September 2017, Line Live announced it would be partnering with German media company ProSiebenSat.1 to enter the German market. Line, whose user base was mainly located in Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Thailand, hoped this would be a first step into the European market, however Line Live has yet to really take off in Germany or anywhere else in Europe.
American live streaming platform YouNow has also established a presence in Germany as well as several other European countries including the UK, Switzerland, and Sweden, although, according to market data platform App Annie, the vast majority of their users and revenue are still coming from North America.
The newest platform to join the European live streaming market isn’t actually new to the European market at all, and that has been to their advantage. In mid-2018, popular German dating app LOVOO, owned by The Meet Group, added live streaming functionality to its existing platform and saw the live feature rapidly adopted by its users, particularly those in German-speaking countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, as well as France, Italy, and Spain.
Where is everyone going instead?
While there are several platforms in Europe, it is surprising there aren’t more, particularly with the recent trend of Chinese live streaming and tech companies such as Bigo Live, Uplive, Live.Me, and Kitty Live expanding abroad. If Europe isn’t a popular choice, where are they going instead?
Many of these Chinese live streaming companies are staying closer to home, focusing on places such as Thailand, India, Singapore and Southeast Asia. According to a recent report from leading Chinese tech news site 36Kr, there are many reasons for this, a simple one being that these countries are closer to China and are in the same or only slightly different time zones, which is much easier from a business operations standpoint. These emerging markets also tend to be much cheaper to operate in and the mobile entertainment space is less saturated.
As with any product, it is important to customize the live streaming platform to meet the needs of the local culture. While still vastly different, it is much easier for Chinese companies to assimilate with other Asian cultures than Western ones.
As for those Chinese companies that are venturing beyond Asia, they are primarily focused on the US and the Middle East.
Why Europe is different
Europe is intimidating for many tech companies and social platforms, not just for live streaming. The region is fragmented with not only numerous languages, but with markedly different cultures.
In a recent interview for the Stream Wars podcast, Eric Jangor, VP of Brand and Communication for LOVOO explained, “What I think the biggest difference is between the European market in comparison to US and China is definitely the scalability. The European market is much more fragmented. Our strongest markets are the German speaking countries: Germany, Austria and Switzerland. However, if you take, for example, Switzerland, they have 8 million inhabitants, but they speak three different languages, French, Italian, and Schwyzerdütsch, which is a version of German which we Germans find difficult to understand.”
Jangor also shared that there is a greater challenge when it comes to recruiting and training live streaming talent, partly because of European culture and partly because of the lack of awareness of the industry.
He shared that, in general, Europeans tend to be less outgoing as well as less inclined to proactively interact with strangers — something that their American counterparts appear to be much better at.
The majority of their top streamers have never streamed before and had little awareness of the live streaming industry prior to seeing the feature on LOVOO. While this means much more training and guidance is required from LOVOO’s talent team, it can also be a good thing because they have less preconceived ideas of what live streaming should be like and have proved quite creative when it comes to their live streaming content.
Don’t disregard Europe’s potential
Though the degree of complexity may be higher, I believe the European live streaming market holds great potential. Jangor points out that, for LOVOO, it was helpful that they already had a well-known brand and a foothold in the market, however developing a robust talent management team was key.
“We had to make sure that the talent managers not only speak their market’s language, but also understand the culture and the cultural codes. So we needed to find people who are still well connected in their countries and are up to date on what is going on in there, but also physically here in Germany,” explained Jangor.
Another positive characteristic of European live streamers, or at least those on LOVOO, is the propensity towards building offline streamer communities, possibly because countries are smaller and broadcasts tend to be more localized.
“The upside is that the regional proximity makes it so much easier for our streamers and viewers to create communities. We have discovered that our streamers really meet offline and organize events themselves, sometimes just with each other and sometimes with their followers as well.”
Jangor explains that the more streamers get to know each other, the friendlier and more supportive they are of each other, which helps them grow more quickly on the platform, which of course benefits the live streaming platform itself.
For now, there is still no clear leader in Europe’s live streaming market, but of course, Jangor says that is a big motivator for the LOVOO team, “To be honest, no one has really cracked the nut and this is also what drives us. Becoming the brand in Europe that you think of when you think of live streaming, that is definitely a big goal for us.”