Live Streaming Through the Periscope
Tang, Venolia & Inkpen (2016) perform an analysis of the emerging applications ‘Periscope’ and ‘Meerkat, now recently shutdown’. These are increasingly popular live streaming applications tightly coupled to Twitter, with Twitter having recently acquired the former. The analysis is conducted through crowd-sourcing a task of describing features including and setting, the authors also conducted 20 interviews with popular streamers. Through crowd-sourcing Tang et al. were able to analyse 486 unique streams out of a total 767 results. This stems from the authors allowing crowd-sourced workers to choose their own streams in order to identify content that an average user may find appealing.
Crowd-sourcing allowed the researchers to determine the content of streams whereas the interviews gave an insight as to why streamers used the applications. Tang et al. found the average stream focused on ‘Meforming’, informing viewers about the streamer in attempt to bolster the streamers popularity. Civic causes could benefit greatly from applications such as Periscope and Meerkat yet surprisingly the authors noted it was uncommon for streams to have a civic content, on the topic the authors noted that such streams were likely to take place in outdoor public spaces but shed little insight as to why they were so uncommon.
The interviews and crowd-sourcing gave an insight as to why the more prominent streamers used the applications as opposed to more common formats, concluding that spontaneity and increased connection with fans was one of the major selling points. Streamers were found to interact with comments over 50% of the time which created a stronger feeling of connection with fans than that of services such as YouTube (Tang et al. 2016). The authors noted that many popular stream formats, such as ‘Ask Me Anything (AMA)’ relied on strong interaction between streamer and viewer, they also stated the asymmetry of interactions, video and comments, allowed for a much greater outreach.
On user experience Tang et al. highlight some areas the interviewees would see improved with the applications, for example, ease of finding interesting streams. The authors however base their criticism of the application from the results of these interviews yet note in similar services content generators are typically 20% of users (Ding et al. 2011). The interviewees stated they only ever watched streams from people they explicitly followed because the applications lacked recommendation features. Users more engaged in consuming content may have very different experiences to the streamers but the authors do not explore this major aspect of the application.
Whilst Tang et al.’s analysis into the applications gives an insight to how they’re used they fail to answer why there has been a growing shift towards these services. The authors touch on topics such as place and identity but never fully explore these in the applications which leaves many questions about the services unanswered. For instance, these applications could be used to further a sense of community for viewers and streamers, as well as being used to facilitate publics, raise awareness, and incite activism, however, the authors only lightly touch these topics. Overall the authors give a broad overview of the range of content to be found on Periscope and Meerkat, but leave many bigger questions about the services unanswered.
The paper I have chosen is Dougherty’s ‘Live-Streaming Mobile Video: Production as Civic Engagement’. This paper explores the role of live streaming in civic causes, something I would have liked to have seen more of in Tang et al.’s paper. Although the platform, Qik, Dougherty bases her analysis is no longer a popular platform many of the points carry over to today.
References
Ding, Y., Du, Y., Hu, Y., Liu, Z., Wang, L., Ross, K. & Ghose, A. (2011), Broadcast yourself: Understanding youtube uploaders, in ‘Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference’, IMC ’11, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 361–370. URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2068816.2068850
Dougherty, A. (2011), ‘Live-Streaming Mobile Video: Production as Civic Engagement’, MobileHCI 2011 pp. 425–434. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2037373.2037437
Tang, J. C., Venolia, G. & Inkpen, K. M. (2016), Meerkat and periscope: I stream, you stream, apps stream for live streams, in ‘Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems’, CHI ’16, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 4770–4780. URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2858036.2858374
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