We all know the internet is all about Video.
It’s the fastest way to communicate between people or business to people. Its taking over text as the most effective way to communicate effectively online. The advertising revenue fight will be between video and advertising bots. This article is about Video, so lets see who we think is going to win the LIVE WAR online.
The main players in this space now.
Facebook has recently rolled out their “LIVE” video to most of their western world users, the other countries left out presently will come on over time.
Users: 1.8 Billion.
Videos per day: reported eight billion video views per day.
Periscope, owned by twitter was the first to gain traction in the LIVE space, today, twitter has rolled out a new feature in their own Twitter App to go LIVE using Periscope from within their twitter app itself.
Users: Active = 2 Million users.
Videos Per day: 350,000 hours of streamed content per day
YouTube has been experimenting with different LIVE capabilities, originating with Google Hangouts, then including YouTube LIVE Events around 12 months ago.
Users: 1 Billion. Though this is of course all YouTube users, not related to how many use YouTube Live Events.
Videos Per day: 4 Billion individual video views per day across all platforms.
SnapChat with their 6 billion video downloads per day is what has prompted the other companies to get serious about Video content.
Users: 100 million daily users.
Videos Per day: 10 Billion Video views per day.
Blab.im is the latest web based LIVE product that has tons of cool features.
Users: N/A
Videos Per day: N/A
Previous LIVE Streaming sites such as LiveStream.com and Ustream as the leaders previously showed the power of live streaming during the Occupy Wall Street protests, streaming live content which was viewed millions of times. In Real time. This was new back then and sites were popping up as directories showing people the different live stream events that were happening. These sites lost relevancy when Google got into the mix with Google hangouts but more specifically YouTube LIVE events. Which provided a better product and completely free.
Advertising Wars, who will win?
Once facebook rolls out LIVE to all its 1.8 Billion users, and their ability to go LIVE to Facebook Pages, that you can then promote through out facebook with incredible targeting capacity will be extremely hard to beat, though for companies targeting the younger demographic there’s a massive reach on Snapchat, particularly using their ability to provide extremely cool methods of interacting with their audience via Branded Filters that are extremely interactive from the users perspective. Google / YouTube / Adsense advertising reach comes via related “content” Vs the targeted demographics of Facebook. Typically for advertisers it’s a combination of using both platforms.
There is the difference between how these companies get their content live.
Facebook, Snapchat, Periscope go LIVE via Mobile Apps, where as YouTube, Blab are desktop applications.
The Mobile LIVE experience is more real time, less produced variation of live content, whereas YouTube LIVE and Blab.im offer are more produced platform to distribute content live with the ability to Edit on the Fly the video content that reaches their audiences. A typical example of this would be the ability to broadcast LIVE a TV live show with advertising opportunities within it, which is impossible via mobile platforms.
I predicted this LIVE Technology, 9 years ago in fact.
Unfortunately I created this just prior to the GFC, which dried up the financial resources and put this project on hold, just after the fully functioning prototype was developed.
Watch this video
Right now I’m in the middle of developing a new software, that allows you to use Facebook LIVE, but with PRODUCED Videos from your desktop, directly to your Facebook Timeline, Fan Page or Facebook Group. This gives a huge advantage to people who want to broadcast “any” video content directly from their desktop to their Facebook Timeline. Here’s an example I release the other day here. The difference being, up until now the only way to get a LIVE video to your timeline was via IOS or Android App, with no ability to upload produced videos.
If you’d like to help me beta test this software. Find out more information here.
