Current Concept: Live Streaming as a Promotion Tool
Live streaming is a trend that has been long foreseen. That said, not until very recently has the live streaming industry been this booming. The concept of using live streams as a tool of promotion has been implemented into marketing strategies very recently. One of the earliest competitors in the field of live streaming was Justin.tv, as far back as March 2007 (Justin.tv, 2017). This platform allowed people to create so-called ‘channels’ and stream self-generated content to be streamed online for the whole world to see. Soon enough, Justin.tv got taken over by “twitch.tv” which continued to be the most popular platform for gaming live streams. Through other social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, this concept became more popular amongst non-gaming communities and we have now arrived at a time where streaming real life activities has become somewhat usual (Mander, 2016).
The core of the concept lies in the way in which social media promotes sharing experiences of any kind. First, Facebook was mainly used to share stories and pictures that one might find worth sharing. As of recently, the simplicity of turning on a live stream made it so accessible to the public that a wider margin of the population started ‘trying it out’, which led to interest of viewers increasing and trying it out themselves.
Various artists have tried to use the concept of promotional live streaming to boost their musical careers, and it proven to make a more lasting impact on the fans, especially when they perform activities similar to the content they are trying to sell, like playing a DJ set (Trandafir, 2016).
The use of livestreams as a promotional tool is not a concept by itself, it is a trend which seems to get overtaken by certain copanies who attach their name to it. Thus, organizations like Twitch and Facebook market their livestream tools in a way that enables users to make use of the streaming opportunity the way they like to. For this purpose, these organizations are allowed to claim a copyright on “(Company) Livestream)”.