Analysis: Video thrills the livestreaming stars
Gig webcasts have a chequered history, to say the least. Squinting at a grainy postage-stamp sized video window trying to make out Madonna, in between swearing at buffering delays wasn’t many fans’ ideas of fun.
However, with technology having improved rapidly, there’s a new buzz around webcasts at the moment, thanks to the efforts of livestreaming companies like Ustream. Even YouTube is getting into the game with some high-profile gigcasts.
Ustream has been particularly busy, integrating its platform with Facebook to allow artists to both broadcast live and interact with their fans. Shakira debuted the video for her new music video Give It Up To Me using Ustream, and attracted 95,000 unique viewers during its initial ten-minute broadcast, and half a million more in the 24 hours after.
Meanwhile, 50 Cent premiered his new Before I Self Destruct movie on Ustream, answering questions from fans live as part of the webcast. More than 255,000 fans tuned in, beating Foo Fighters’ recent gigcast, which attracted a still-impressive 150,000+ viewers.
And then there’s YouTube, which racked up a whopping 10 million streams of its livecast of a U2 gig last month, and has this week announced that it will be following up with a livestream of Alicia Keys’ New York concert next week.
As yet, nobody seems worried that these online (and free) webcasts will cannibalise other revenue streams such as live DVDs. However, it’s unclear whether the advertising revenues around the webcasts are significant or not – they may be just seen as pure promotion for now.
The key to all this activity is more bandwidth and better technology, ensuring a smoother and less frustrating experience for watching fans. However, the addition of interactivity and social features is also a big part of the current excitement around these livestreams.
Fiddy answering fans’ questions is part of that, but platforms like Ustream also hook into Facebook to allow fans to chat to each other about what they’re watching – and have their comments appear in their Facebook feed, which serves as handy viral promotion for the event. Twitter is also increasingly being integrated into these livestreams.
All the stars mentioned above are, well, stars. YouTube isn’t (for now at least) making its platform available to unsigned or indie acts with more niche appeal. However, Ustream is opening up its technology to a wider range of bands to use within their Facebook Fan Pages, while its iPhone and Android applications let anyone get in on the act.
Tags: 50 cent, foo fighters, livestream, Shakira, u2, ustream, youtube
November 27th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
[...] 1 votes vote Analysis: Video thrills the livestreaming stars Gig webcasts have a chequered history, to say the least. Squinting at a grainy postage-stamp [...]
November 27th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by intradink_feed and eMusic Talk, invisiblepilot. invisiblepilot said: Analysis: Video + live streaming live music events http://bit.ly/4xaFvK [...]