The Unstoppable Rise of Live Online Video #DigitalSense

Live online video has shot to the top of the media industry’s priorities of late, but experts who missed the subject off their 2016 trends lists needn’t feel embarrassed. In a rare interview, Facebook’s senior management recently admitted that even they only saw the opportunity themselves when they were reviewing internal data back in February.

Twitter’s Periscope app is a perfect fit with its aspiration to be the best possible “live connection to culture” for users (and indeed for non-users), but its recently announced NFL live streaming sponsorship is a radical new play beyond that. Twitter will no longer just be a place to discuss the live TV you’re watching, it will be the place you go to watch that content in the first place. Use of the platform recently saw a Russian juror at the Eurovision Song Contest disqualified, raising new questions about the legalities of live broadcasting.

By forcing users to use the camera, not the photo album, Snapchat has been encouraging its users to share live moments from the very beginning. Their deal with NBC to broadcast clips from the Olympics this summer is however another step change in the type of live content users will consume on the platform. YouTube for their part have offered live streaming for years, initially for rare professional live broadcasts it became widely avaiilable as part of their Hangouts on Air product.

Facebook’s own Live video launched last year for influencers, and its immediate success put its engineers into a five-week lockdown to build out new functionality rapidly, allowing them largely to achieve parity with Twitter’s more established offering. The newsfeeds of 1.6 billion users provide a huge audience for live video to play out through, and the launch of a new Live API allows this functionality to be built out into a wide range of services or even devices. Where Twitter will continue to have the advantage, though, is the higher percentage of those user streams that will be shared publicly and not just among friends.

However, it is misleading to call live video a new trend. Data from Pivotal Research Group shows that almost 80% of US video viewing still takes place through live TV, while digital video recorders account for 9%, and computers, mobiles and other devices represent just over 10% in total. For a long time, social platforms have experimented with being the “second screen”, but now they’re looking to go one further.

Live online video takes many forms – it can be professional broadcasts from studios, it can be behind-the-scenes footage, it can be citizen journalists, and it can of course be people sharing relatively throwaway moments in their lives. It’s hard to predict exactly what content will come to dominate, and so far an English puddle has captivated Periscope and more than 800k people watched Buzzfeed’s exploding water melon.

A growing problem for social platforms is not people’s willingness to watch video, but their ability to produce it – newsfeeds are increasingly dominated by video posts but few of them come from friends. Setting up, recording and uploading a video is a much bigger undertaking than just snapping a picture, and for all but the most spontaneous of moments it’s a process that requires more thought and effort that we’re willing to give, not to mention the pressure to produce something as good as professional content that is being shared.

With this in mind there’s a slightly less optimistic perspective to be had on Facebook’s sudden live obsession – rather than just being an exciting new opportunity, it might represent a fix to a real problem. Recent reports have highlighted that original sharing (ie user-generated content) has been rapidly declining and this has the potential slowly to undermine the platform’s entire value proposition. At the recent Facebook developers’ conference executives acknowledged this trend, but argued that for the most part users were simply using a wider range of platforms (dominated by its other properties Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) to communicate as well, and the amount of time all users spend on the platform continues to increase.

Live is the perfect antidote to this, because by its very nature it’s rough and unrehearsed. Mark Zuckerberg describes use of the feature as “a new, raw way that people wanted to share on a day-to-day basis. We’re seeing this especially with young people and teens.” This is a generation that finds the weight of perfectly curating their social presence so draining that they’re turning to places where they can instantly be forgotten, or at least private in their embarrassment. More than anything it’s this willingness to share fleeting live moments that has fuelled Snapchat’s growth, so while Facebook Live video may look like a rival to Periscope its target is perhaps more squarely aimed at that yellow messaging app.

For all the industry noise however, YouTube still remains the true destination for online video, but it has work to do to find its place in the new live trend. With mobile YouTube sessions now averaging more than 40 minutes, it's clearly a place where users are willing to stick around and watch content unfold, not just see a few fleeting seconds as feed based platforms tend to encourage. The biggest ever marketing live stream remains Red Bull's Stratos jump, which was streamed globally on YouTube. Similarly the platform has much more quietly been making deals with broadcasters to stream a wide range of content, including for instance this week's Eurovision Song Contest.

You can be sure that marketers will be jumping on this opportunity with events and stunts to generate live content. Some will succeed and become industry case studies, but there’s caution that live video’s rise doesn’t necessarily mean brands have to also start producing their own, which will often be a costly and impractical task. If live video streams succeed in getting more eyeballs to social platforms and keeping them there for longer then that simply means there are more opportunities for marketers to communicate their own messages within that.

Twitter’s Amplify product already allows advertisers to run pre-roll video in front of live content and they are turning that into a far more scalable product that can be activated against almost any video on the platform. In this way advertisers can be at the very heart of moments without having to create them themselves. Facebook will need to build out a clearer monetisation route but, until then, if Live is bringing people back to their newsfeeds more often then it’s already helping create more opportunities for traditional promoted posts to be 

If you’re still thinking about social media marketing purely as a way of engaging fans then you’re increasingly missing the point – truthfully, that’s a far smaller opportunity than reaching millions with rich storytelling content. The Facebooks and Twitters of today are no longer text update platforms to stay in touch with your friends, they’re mobile video channels that are gearing up for the biggest fight of their lives: the one where they try and persuade you to look away from your TVs.

This post originally featured on the Guardian Media & Tech Network.

I am a marketer who helps global brands make sense of media in a digital world; Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. #DigitalSense is my attempt to cut through the hype that too often surrounds the industry. I am Digital Partner at Carat Global, an agency redefining how the world's biggest brands think about media, though these are my personal thoughts.