And We're Live!

Europa today. Yeah, she is unavailable, but she did submit some information that we will be covering in today's episode. It's really too bad that she's all the way out in Europa because there's no WiFi there and if she, if she had WiFi, she could live cast into this podcast and then we'd still have her here. She could like periscope from up there. Except to guess, there would probably be a very long delay, A significant delay. Yes, so maybe more than twenty minutes. I don't know how

long exactly it would be. It would be pretty long, and so you wouldn't get your comments answered. It would be a pretty crappy live stream. Let's be Frank, she would be constantly interrupting us with with things that are twenty minutes out of out of alignment with the rest of the show. So we're gonna talk today about live casting or live streaming because it's one of those things that has become increasingly more popular. Uh, I'd say really over the last year, in particular as it's as it's

taken over mobile platforms. Yeah, and you might be able to debate why exactly it has become so popular, like is this an organic popularity that comes out of people's desire to see live things happening over the internet, or is it a sort of top down popularity because it's being promoted by the platforms on which it happened. And it may very well be a combination of the two. You'll just have to listen and to hear what we think. But I guess we need to define what this is.

And really it's all in the name. It's broadcasting, right, live casting or live streaming. Either way, it's about using some service or app or whatever in order to stream live video and audio from a device up to the Internet and then down to an audiences group of devices and whatever they may be. Yeah, and there are actually

a lot of tools out there to do this today. Now, we actually have talked about this on the podcast before, but this is one area where I feel like there has been significant growth since the last time we talked about it. Yeah, the episode we did was back in May of My So called Life casting Who came up with that title? Always a good question, it's an excellent well it since it's three years ago, I'm not entirely sure. Uh,

it's possible it was me, but I don't know. I definitely was aware of my so called life and watched all of it. Now, why does she go with him? I mean she didn't have to or never mind, I'm just gonna it's the perennial question people have been asking since Little Women. Yeah, that's true, exactly before before MTV. Okay, but anyway, So we talked about some things. We talked about Google glass and apparently we talked about the word

vlog too much tittering and amusement. Yeah, we talked a lot about stuff that is uh is quaint today just just a mirror three years later. I think the idea back then was we were talking about the question of of recording our whole lives well. And we also talked a little bit about broadcasting, because we talked a little bit about things like justin TV and that sort of stuff, that the platforms that were out there that allow people to kind of turn their lives into a reality television

show or the equivalent thereof. But back then, which is weird to say for something that was only three years ago, primarily you did that through a desktop or laptop computer that had a webcam and a microphone. Right. You didn't really have a an easy way to do that in a mobile application for a couple of different reasons. I mean, you had to have the right camera quality, microphone quality, you had to have the right U upload bit rate. Yeah,

that was a big one. Was waiting for the cellular and WiFi businesses to get to a point where you would have the throughput to upload live video a stream of live video, and also to be able to consume that live video. But we've gotten to that point now, and I would say that the mobile approach has has really pushed this live experience thing um much more into

the public thought than it had been three years ago. Yeah, I would agree with that, and I would also say that if you go with certain models of live casting, because we can talk about the different ways the the live casters have approached to this. If you go with the model that was envisioned by, say, the founder of Periscope, the mobile aspect is especially important. Yes, yeah, and uh and so, and in fact, there are certain ones like Periscope where if you aren't on a mobile platform you

have a severe disadvantage on the service. Like you can watch a Periscope livestream on a desktop computer, but when it comes to things like commenting and that sort of stuff, you need to be on the mobile app in order to have that kind of experience. Yeah, now we probably don't need to explain this to you, but just to briefly map the ground on which we stand. It is not a recent thing being able to broadcast video live.

This is something that goes way back to you know, live live news program really goes back to the birth of television, because when TV first started, it was cheaper to to just broadcast than it was to try and store things on a medium, and so it made way more sense that television was just this kind of uh, ephemeral thing that if you weren't there to if you weren't there to witness it. You missed it her kids,

Here's a very slow and awkward puppet show. Yeah, seriously, there's a great there's a great sequence of skits on uh and I talked about the show all the time. But that Mitchell and web look which British sketch show where they they do this whole thing where it's the birth of television and everyone is incredibly awkward, and they say, it's so early now, we aren't even certain if we

should be facing you or in profile. So for the rest of this I will be facing to my left and he just turns and and then they told us we we I know that you can hear us, but we don't yet know if we can hear you. So if you could shout I hear you when I say this, that would be very helpful. And he says, hello, oh I heard that. Oh wait, that's just the set in the next room. So this whole idea that TV is so new that they don't even know how to use it yet. Well, in the way we're kind of in

that with the lives streaming on the internet. Despite the fact that we've been dealing with live broadcast a video for quite some time, yeah. But of course, the this goes on into the age where most programs are taped ahead of time, and even a lot of times you have the semi live situations right where something is sort of live but on a maybe very brief delay. Seven

second delay is the standard you hear bandied about. That's that's there in case something unexpected happens, in case one of the newscasters gets a little wild, right, or or or something like if it's an anchor who's out there on a live report, if something happens in the frame that they feel is not something that they want to broadcast, they'll interrupted and come back. That kind of thing. It's

a a protective measure. But let's talk about how the transition over into the digital version of live casting and live streaming, how that's had a big advantage over the traditional media, the television and radio, which you know that that's set the standard or live broadcast. Well, one obvious advantage is going to be accessibility. You and I do not have the equipment to live broadcast on television because we do not have a television station and and antenna

and all those things we would need. But it turns out these days if you have a smartphone, you can broadcast on the internet. Yeah. Yeah, if you have either a computer with that webcam and microphone and an Internet connection, or just a smartphone, you can walk around and and carry with you a live broadcast studio. But I must say, even even today, wouldn't it be really cool to have a television broadcast van. Yeah no, I mean I've seen one parked in front of my house a couple of times.

I guess it's just an area where they like to report about. Across the street from me, there's a train yard where often they shoot a lot of I know exactly what you're talking about. I walked past that with my dog. Yeah, so that train yard ends up being a movie set, movie product and said a lot. So I see these and every time I see when, I think I'd like I'd like to have one of those.

But but not having one. But having a smartphone that's capable of broadcasting live video is pretty cool, especially since I can reach people I know. And in fact, this is another big advantage that live streaming on digital has over traditional media. Traditional media like that that sketch I talked about earlier. It's one way communication. Yeah, you say, can you hear me, and they actually can say yes, we can hear you, because they can comment on the

video as you're broadcasting. Yeah, almost every live streaming app or service out there has some sort of comment or chat component to it, So you've got this interactive feature that is absent in traditional media, and that's a very engaging experience when you are especially if you're a fan of somebody and you're watching them live and then you get a chance to say something to that person and they might react to that. That there's a bit of

a and a rush that comes along with that. And we've seen that just as just we're not celebrities by any stretch of the imagination, but I've had experiences where I've responded to someone mentioning something online and uh in real time and they freak out, which is odd but fun. Yeah. Well, the other thing I would say is that I think the commenting back and forth aspect, it introduces an element of unpredictability and sort of a wild card variation to

what's going to happen live. So imagine somebody here at how Stuff Works is doing a live broadcast on something they talked about on their podcast that week, and then the user says, hey, did you read about this thing that's pertinent into what you're talking about? And the host says, oh, no, I didn't. And then there's actual constructive back and forth going on between content creator and their audience, and they're

they're learning from one another. It's wonderful. And on the other hand, you've got maybe trolls who want to come in and say, hey, I don't like your face. You know, you're whatever, And they both kind of play on the same thing. I mean, obviously one is good and one is bad, but both introduce this element of unpredictability. There's

something real happening right now. Well, yeah, it's it's more akin to live theater than it is to your traditional television show, right because you've actually got an audience that can impact the course of the live event. Are they gonna laugh? Are they going to clap? Are they gonna heckle? Right? And uh? And that's a lot different than if you're just in front of a camera and you know there's a crew there that might snicker if you screw up or might they do they do every time, every darn time.

But generally speaking, you don't have that that uh interaction. You could have with a live audience. Hey, I've got I've got another thing. What do you know? So, if you go on TV and you want to broadcast to people, there are limits on what you're allowed to do without having to pay some hefty fine. Yeah, unless you are

on like a special cable network. But if you're on regular broadcast television, you have to bow to the whims of the f c C here in the United States, and they set down certain rules and regulations, particularly in regards to obscenity, in decency and profanity, So you are not allowed to say certain words. I mean, George Carlin had the magnificent comedic routine about the seven words you're not allowed to say. On television, you can say I'm all.

On periscope you can. And now there's some platforms out there that have specific user agreements that say you will not broadcast like a sexual material, that kind of stuff on their platforms. They don't want to turn into a porn hosting right program, And if you you know, if you're using that service, it means that you had to agree to their terms of use, which means if you break that, if you go and broadcast something that goes against their terms of use. You could get banned or whatever,

or you know, sanctioned in some way. UM. And it's not the same as the Feds coming in after you, but it it is something that's up to a platform by platform, and it's also contingent upon region of broadcast.

I suppose. Yes, China recently got into the news, and by recently, I mean like the last week when we're recording the week before we're recording this, um, and the news was that the Chinese authorities had decided to ban a specific activity being streamed on live video and that activity wild be women eating bananas in a suggestive manner. This is I support free speech, but that is kind of a weird thing to stream. Yeah it well, I agree,

it's a weird thing to stream. It's also a weird thing to really hone in on and say you can't do that in China. There are a lot of different regulations that have been passed recently, UM in regard it's to this live streaming service, because it's something that's really taking off in China. The Chinese market, of course, is enormous. The smartphone market is huge, so there's a lot of

opportunity there. But The Chinese authorities, in their efforts to curtail what they see as being um offensive or unsuitable material, has gone on to ban not just that, but also things like you aren't allowed to appear on video wearing stockings and suspenders. They say, um, yeah, there's a lot of different things that are tends that tend to be identified as being sexually suggestive at least, what I hold on, what if you're wearing a Mickey Mouse costume that's got suspenders.

What are you gonna do now? So why are you wearing the stockings? It's stockings and suspenders. I yeah, So see there's your problem. Then they say, well, now you've you've made Mickey Mouse wear stockings, and that's where we draw the line. Um, this is not a Mickey Mouse operation,

as they would say. Well, apart from regulations being imposed from the outside by say government or organizations, there are also plenty of technical limitations on what has been possible in the past, and to some extent on what is still possible with live casting via digital devices right uh now. One of the things we mentioned earlier is the bit rate problems. I would suggest this is probably much more of a problem at the content creators end than the

consumers end. Right, generally speaking, upload speeds are a tenth of what download speeds are, right, and you've got the problem there you have. If you have one viewer with a bad download speed, it just affects the one viewer. If you have one broadcaster with a bad upload speed, it affects all viewers. Right. So one way to get around that obviously is coming up with new compression strategies

for video and audio. Right, So if you can come up with new ways to compress that live video so that it can fit in a smaller package data package as you send it up, that speeds things up. And then you know, assuming that your audience has the proper means of of decompressing that audio and video, which they would because they'd have whatever app is relevant to what you're using. Uh, everything's cool because then all the work is being done by the processors for the compression and decompression.

But that that's just part of it. Obviously. Another big advantage was when we started seeing UH four G and better technologies for transmission for cellular data. WiFi obviously also has improved in its upload and download speeds. So until that happened, it was not really feasible to use devices,

particularly mobile devices, to broadcast live video. You could more easily record a video and then upload it, but obviously that would take a lot of time depending on the limitations of whatever technology you were using, and at that point it's not live casting anymore. Yeah, now these days, like I can use and I have, I've used a

live streaming service. I would specifically used Periscope to live cast when I was walking to or from the office, just so I could chat with folks, because that's a long walk for me, It's like an hour long walk.

And occasionally I'll just turn what's your data plan? Oh, I have unloaded data, so I don't have to Yeah, if I didn't have unloaded that's another technical issue, right, data caps that really is a big issue both for Actually, I would have a more of a problem at home using my desktop, which has a data cap attached to it because of my home internet service, as opposed to using my phone, which has no data cap attached to it. Yeah, it's a little odd, but data caps are another technical

that's not really a technical uh different challenge. Rather that's one that's imposed by It's more kind of like the FCC. Yeah, it's imposed by I s p s, by Internet service providers, but at any rate, Um, I I use this periscope while I'm walking. I'm using it on a cellular network, but there are sections on my walk where my cellular service starts to get a little wishy washy, and I'm thinking it must be at a point where there's a handshake happening. Handshake is when it's being passed from one

cellular tower to another. And I have often like there's one specific spot on my walk where people are like the video has gotten terrible, or I can't hear what you're saying, or you're cutting in and out, and it's always in the same spot. So so that's where you're walking over the ancient cursed graveyards. Yeah, the Indian burial ground, Uh, obvious. Weirdly enough, it's actually at the bottom of a hill.

So it's probably, like I said, right in between two cell towers where the handoff is happening the spirit of a bunch of prisoners from this former prison colony. Yeah. Yeah. And and there are other technical challenges to like, for example, the fact that if the service you're relying on ends up going down for whatever reason, then you you can

no longer life cast. Right, So if Twitch were to crash for some reason, or if the servers that handle the traffic for Periscope or Facebook Live or anything like that were to suffer some problems, then that would prevent you from being able to live stream or live cast. Um And maybe that all the equipments working fine on the broadcaster side and on the audience side, but it's the stuff in the middle that's screwed up. So that's

a possibility to well. So let's say you've got all that stuff locked down, you say, okay, we we figured out how to We've got good hardware, we've got good upload and download rates, we can compress videos so that it comes through all right and doesn't use too much data.

But you can still have problems because when you have a service that's supposed to provide live video to people, the services more than just streaming the data from one place to another, Right, it's also stuff like how do you get the viewers to the place where they're gonna watch it and get them watching something that they want to watch. Yeah, there's definite discovery. Discovery is a huge challenge.

I mean, it's well and that's gonna get harder. In fact, we're gonna we're gonna be talking later in this episode about kind of looking forward at live casting, and one of the things I would like to to think about is um and is live casting just gonna become similar to YouTube and that in the early days of YouTube, if you had a voice, and you had a really distinctive way of delivering your message, you had a really

good chance of being discovered. Today, there's so much going up on YouTube, and I mean you know that, they say, like more than a hundred hours every minute goes up on YouTube. There's so much stuff going up on YouTube that getting discovered is incredibly challenging. I suspect that live casting is going to turn into the same thing, and probably on a much faster ramp up than YouTube did. Well,

it's too many content providers, not enough eyeballs. Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean, if you It makes me think of some of the streams I've seen where I've commented on stuff, and then I start recognizing the other people who are commenting, and I realized we're all content providers commenting on another content provider. Have we just become this insular circular audience where all we're what doing is watching

what each other is doing. Jonathan, can you even imagine the horror of those of you out there right now who just hear us bandying around words like content provider when really we should be saying artists. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't. Okay, there's certain words. There's certain words I don't like using, but I do because it's become the standard, right, content provider being one of them. But that is what it's called in the industry. If that other people look at on the internet, you're a

content provide. Talent is another one I don't. I don't like being called the talent um for multiple reasons. But at any rate, there are a lot of words in the industry that I would prefer to use a synonyms for, but that's kind of the standards. Also, we should just point out that there's a lot of competition and already in this space right there are a lot of different providers offering up services that are similar to one another.

And therein lies another problem because that divides the audience further. You know, not not everyone is going to have every

live streaming app. You know, it's just not not something that most people are interested in, so your audience, you have to sit there and start making decisions like do I want most of my audience, do I think most of the people that I need to reach, or on this platform or this other platform, And you start having to make really tough decisions on that, particularly if you want to try and make a living off of this. Not everyone does if you. If you're just doing it

for fun, maybe it doesn't matter. But if you're trying to make a living, you might say, well, what percentage of my fan base is active on Facebook versus Twitter, just as an example, or would it be better for me to go to something like Twitch, which is a more specific live streaming video service. You know, I used to think Twitch was just for video games until I heard that some people use Twitch to say, like, here,

watch me show you how to weave a basket. Well, for a while, Twitch was just about video games, and if your content did not have anything to do about video games, they'd say knock that off or play some games. Uh. It wasn't until that they started opening it up to stuff. That was because I have a friend who used Twitch to live stream his his podcast, and his podcast occasionally would talk about video games, but it wasn't a video game oriented podcast, and there were issues that he had

with Twitch. It was a very popular show, but which was like, no, it has to be about video games. And then about a year later that's when they changed their their policy. But at any rate, you also don't know how many of these conflicting services are still going to be around in years to come. Right, if one of them n's up being really dominant in the space,

the others might end up fading way. Well, I think at the moment we're recording this, there is a large scuffle going on, right, there's there are multiple scuffles going on. One of the scuffles. I mean there's a major uh there has been recently and there is still major competition for live video us. Yeah, I mean, you know you've got you've got the major players in their Facebook is

in there, YouTube is in there. Then you've got things like Periscope that that are still in there, and then you have former streaming services like mere cat walk about. Yeah it's uh, never once used it, but it has a cute name. As a cute name and apparently was a very easy user interface by the time I I didn't have access to it because it opened up originally to innern iPhone users and I use an Android device.

In fact, periscope was the same way. It was active first on i iOS and took a while to get over to Android. Irritates me because Android is a far more popular platform. But that's a different story. It's a different podcast. Um any rate, I never got a chance to use Merecat, and then by the time I really would have taken a look at it, it was no longer supported. It's still a thing, but we'll get into that. In fact, let's talk about some of these main players,

the big names that are in the a live streaming field. Okay, well, you mentioned Twitch, and should we count video game play because obviously that is a form of live streaming some type of content. But when I was first thinking about the topic for this episode, I was thinking about people sort of talking to a camera. But but I guess it wouldn't have to be that, would it. It doesn't

have to be that. And also, you've got a lot of Twitch gamers who have a picture within picture presentation, so the major picture is the video game they're playing, and they have a smaller picture, which is a camera that's on them a reaction camera, and they do tend to address the audience live while they play. Not everyone

does this, obviously. Some people just play through a game and they're just showing how they play, and maybe that's all you're doing, is just passively watching someone else play a game. But a lot of them turn it into something more where they might be commenting on something completely unrelated to the game they're playing. They might be telling a story or explaining their personal political philosophy and maybe

in anything. So I think it's certainly counts. The interesting thing to me is that twitch dot tv started off as a spinoff of justin TV and it became so popular. Is that was that a Justin Bieber based service? It was not. It was named after the founder or one of the founders, So justin TV was. It was pretty popular as a live streaming service as as far as those go in the early days. I mean, it was one of those things that wasn't nearly as popular as

the stuff we're talking about today. But it was, uh like Justin TV and you Stream were like the two big names in live casting. But dude, I forgot about you stream. Oh I didn't. That's what we used to uh live stream how stuff works live. Yeah, we could have upwards of thirty six people watching our show at a time, but it was kept online so you could

actually watch the old episodes afterwards at any rate. It got so popular that justin TV actually rebranded itself as a Twitch Interactive and eventually ended up getting the attention of some pretty big players in the space. I was rumored that Google was going to buy Twitch Interactive, but it turned out that Amazon announced it would acquire Twitch for about nine hundred seventy million dollars, so just under

a billion. That's some amount of dollars. As quite a few dollars, quite a few more than I will ever see in my entire life, which is fine mostly but anyway, Uh twitch has more than a million broadcasters and more than a hundred million monthly visitors to the site, so it's a pretty big business. And you know, I'm sure it's the sort of thing that confounds people in the cable industry, like why are where are these kids just logging in to watch some other kids play video games?

We want them on our watching our shows and watching our commercials and buying bugging mom and dad to buy our stuff. Um, but that's it's just been wildly popular their professional life casters on Twitch, and the way they make their money is through a multitude of ways. They can get sponsorships, they can get ad revenue, they can have partnerships with Twitch itself. If they are a partner with Twitch, they can then charge subscribers a certain amount

of money in order to access uh new features. For example, it may be that if you're on a Twitch performers stream and you're you're in the chat room. You can chat and stuff, but you start seeing like weird UH emojis and things popping up that you don't have access to. If you become a paid subscriber, you get access to like v I P chat areas and special emoticons, that kind of stuff. What happens behind the closed doors of Twitch. Yeah, it's that exclusivity that ends up being the big selling

factor there. Uh. And also it may be that the person playing is paying more attention to the subscriber chat than the general chat that kind of stuff. Um. They also can ask for donations as well. It's not just through through these kind of approaches that it was interesting. It looked to me like, UM, I read an article about this and in the article, the person who was writing it just made some estimated guesses about how much

this one Twitch user was making a year. And we're talking about someone who has nine hundred thousand subscribers and uh and a lot of different ads and things, and they estimated that based upon those numbers and not taking into account things like donations or other sponsorships, that they

were making two thousand dollars a year playing games. Now, to be fair, they're also working like sixty hour weeks doing this stuff, So it sounds like, oh wow, First that sounds amazing, and then you sit there and think, man, that sounds exhausting too, So it's not it's not necessarily the coushy job that a lot of people just imagine it is. Yeah, But then again, I guess a lot of people work sixty hours a week doing stuff that is uh yeah, maybe not not as video games and

all up. Yeah, but you have to be you have to be good at too. Write like I mean, I guess there's some entertainment value and someone who's who's perpetually terrible at video games if their presentation is right. Yeah, but that sounds like a kind of chemick that might not last very long for for more than just a handful of performers out there. Um, but let's talk about

some of the other ones. Let's talk about periscope. Well, periscope is one that we're familiar with because a lot of us here at the House Stuff Works office have done periscope broadcasts where a lot of times, for example, podcast hosts will set up a weekly periscope session where they will just talk to their listeners. And so I've done that for my, uh, the other podcasts that I'm

on here Stuff to Blow your Mind. My co hosts Robert Lamb and Christian Zeger and I will sometimes get on periscope and just talk to people about episodes that have come out recently, what's coming up at next, and answer questions. A lot of times people have questions about stuff that we didn't cover in each of the episodes, and and so it can be a lot of fun. I enjoy it. And so the presentation of periscope is

pretty straightforward. It's just you have a camera. Uh, the camera broadcasts what it sees in real time live, so usually it'll just be us sitting around talking to the camera. But you can also use it to broadcast I don't know whatever is going on around you if you wanted to point it out the window at to somebody who is scaling the side of the building you're working in with suction cup hands. I don't know why I went to that. Then I guess that's just something I expect

to see someday. Uh, you could periscope that. So it's that. But then also people can comment, comments come in, you can interact with them if you want to. I would recommend if you are a periscope uh broadcaster, you probably should interact with the comments because people kind of like to have that interactive experience. They want to hear back from you. Otherwise they start suspecting that, hey, this is just this isn't live, which is weird for periscope, but

I get that all the time on Facebook Life. They get mad if you don't interact. Yeah, uh and so,

and that's pretty much what it is. So. Periscope was founded by Cavon, Bike Poor and Joe Bernstein, and according to the official creation legend, bike Poor was traveling in istanbul In when a bunch of protests broke broke out in Tuxim Square in Istanbul and he wasn't at the location of the protest, but he wanted to know what was going on, and so he could check Twitter to see what people were saying about the event, but he

couldn't see the event for himself. And talking to Business Insider, he said, quote, it just occurred to me, there were so many smartphones out there, Why wasn't there a way for me to ask who else was out there and what was happening there? Um and so in the early press, periscope was often compared to teleportation. I find that kind of a funny metaphor because really the obvious point of comparison to me is just like having a live video

camera there. Yeah, I don't really see the teleportation aspect, but I think I think it would depend on I think it's the fact that live video, uh, it's it's tough to get live video of brand new, breaking events unless it was something that was scheduled right Like, it's you know, the idea of being someplace when you know something's going to happen, as opposed to the fact that since we all have smartphones these days, and I know that I'm making a crazy generalization to say all, but

since there's so many smartphones out there that are capable of broadcasting. Now, it would be unusual for a public event to occur where there are no smartphones capable of broadcasting that. So it is more like teleportation because unlike you're seeing, you know, live video of of the aftermath of an event, you can actually see live video of lots of events because the cameras are already everywhere well, And I think that's another way that the interaction is

very important. It's a very important element of periscope where it's more like teleportation, and that you can't just watch what's happening. You can comment on it, and you can try to get the person who's holding the phone to do something and say like, hey, can you hold about higher. I want to see what's going on here, look around the corner of that kind of stuff. Yeah, uh, And so that that that went on for a while. Twitter bought periscope in January. For what was the number you

saw on that? I saw around a hundred million, But there were a lot of guesses all over the place. It's it really First of all, I keep it pretty quiet. But secondly, because periscope still wasn't really a thing when Twitter bought them, like it hadn't really made a big splash. Um it was what the what happened in the aftermath of Twitter buying Periscope made more news than the fact Twitter brought periscope. Uh yeah, and so in August periscope claimed it had ten million users. More on that number

and a bit yeah. And also, uh, the other thing I thought was really fun about periscope and I'm glad that they fixed it so it no longer becomes like a a means of one upsmanship between between various periscopers is that if you like what you're watching, you can tap your screen. It sends little hearts to show up in the video. It's so nice seeing all those little

hearts floating. It was very sweet. It's very reaffirming. Uh. And for a while periscope took count of all those hearts, which ended up becoming like almost like bragging rights for various um uh parascopers out there. Like it was this idea that by having this most liked video, it's gonna jump up the charts and be easily discovered. Right, I know, Jonathan, tell the truth. It just steamed your biscuits that you didn't get the most hearts. It's not so much that,

but rather that the system was easily gained. Yeah, Like it was very easy to just watch your own thing and just keep hitting hearts, hearts, hearts, hearts, hearts, and you could just tell your viewers like, hey, hammer on those hearts for us, We've done it before. It's funny, yeah, and then so do it. They're they're like little automata.

They just right well, and on the flip side, so are we because they asked us to do things, and occasionally we do them to prove that it's live, and then it all just turns out that we're the ones being puppeteered. But at any rate, the that no longer holds that much water, Like it's not it's not something that really boosts a video's performance in any meaningful way. It's just a nice feedback mechanism. So it's not like

a has any meaningful impact at this point. The other service we wanted to talk about that was very similar to Periscope would be mere Cat. Mere Cat and Periscope when they first came out, they were very very similar. Um mere Cat was released in February, just ahead of South By Southwest, and it was very much a favorite

at that at that. Yeah. Yeah, and this is something we see all the time where we'll see apps get launched either just before or at south By Southwest in an attempt to generate a lot of bus because that's where you've got a ton of people south By Southwest interactive as a lot of folks who are influential in the text space. And if you can get a lot of people using your app, generally speaking, it tends to

turn out pretty well for you. And uh, it got a lot of widespread attention at south By Southwest, but it also relied on Twitter to allow live casters a chance to reach an audience. It tapped into Twitter's social graph in other words. And then Twitter in March cut off mere Cat's ability to use the Twitter log in after Twitter bought Periscope, Yeah by a couple of months. Yeah, so when Baroscope came out using Twitter's a p I, uh,

mere Cat mysteriously no longer had access to it. And that ended up causing a lot of conversation in the space about how Twitter was allowed to do this because their private company and they bought this other tool, and they said, look, our policy says that if you try and replicate something that we have we can kick you off. And we bought this company back in January, and you launched your service in February, and so, uh, it was kind of a little ugly, but Merecat soldiered on for

about a year. Uh. In August of twenty fifteen, it was already clear that the service was on the downward slope, and by March twenty sixteen, CEO Ben Reuben made the decision to change the company's focus too and always live social network. I don't know what that really means yet either, Yeah, because as far as I know, Merecat hasn't actually launched anything new, but they did say they were essentially pulling

all their resources off of live video. Not that the tool is gone, but there's no more development in that space for Meercat there, So no, it's that's a lost cause for us um and so it doesn't look great for live video from Meercat anymore. Well. Yeah, and I found an article on recode that had a part of an email from the Mercat CEO, Ben Reuben to investors

from February. I thought this was interesting. So he was kind of trying to explain what had gone on with the bad year, and in what he said was quote, mobile broadcast video hasn't quite exploded as quickly as we'd hoped. The distribution advantages of Twitter, Periscope, and Facebook Live drew more early users to them away from us, and we were not able to grow as quickly alongside as we

had planned. So that's talking about one thing. There is just like who has access to people using the internet right now, who can steer them, you know, sort of funnel them in the live broadcast direction that that they want. And then also I thought that was interesting that he said that broadcast video hasn't quite exploded as quickly as we'd hoped, because I mean, if you read everything else, it's like, oh man, this is the way of the future.

Everybody's got to get on live broadcasts. Well again, I mean, is is that just him spinning it the you know, the way that makes his company look better, or I think it's I think it's more Again back to that problem of so many different competitors in the space. That fractures the audience, right the market share gets divvied up. So some people may be like, listen, I don't want to use Facebook. I just use Twitter, So I want you to be on periscope. I've got some people who

have said that to me. When I do, I I'll put out a blast on Twitter saying hey, I'm going live on Facebook Live at three o'clock so you can tune in at how stuff works is Facebook page and watch me and I I often will get a message of saying, hey, I don't use Facebook anymore? Could you? Have you ever thought about going back to periscope and just a little peek behind the curtain. The reason why I tend to use Facebook Live more than baroscope is that,

at least based upon the metrics, more people watch. So those metrics are also kind of interesting. We'll talk about talking and it may very well be that there's a particular thing Facebook does that is uh misleading me into

thinking that. But at at any rate, um, you know, mircat now looks like it's heading more towards using are developing a tool that's kind similar to like skype Ree, Google hang Out, something that's meant for a video messaging service that would be more like a closed group as opposed to one person broadcasting to a lot of people. So it could be like if we wanted to do a little video chat among the writers one day that

might be a tool we would use. I don't really know why they would go into that space, seeing is how it's already represented by some pretty hefty companies like Skype and Google. But that's that's at least some of the speculation around this. Uh, We've got other examples their Snapchat, although that's really almost live. It's not really a live video streaming service. You can record very short video snippets

and people can then watch them. The big attraction to Snapchat is that it only lives on the servers for twenty four hours. Usedly, yeah, at least it's only accessible by by viewers for twenty four hours. But there of course I have vague memories of us having talked about this on the show before there being some big aster

risk to that. Yeah, it's I don't recall with enough detail to say now there there's some there's some definite, uh, questionable things going on, not questionable in the sense of the content may still very well live on a server. You can actually save stuff to your snaps too. You can save your own snaps. Also, there are a lot of tools out there for people to save stuff, um that they see on Snapchat, like little add ons that weren't intended originally by the service but have obviously popped up.

So that's only kind of semi live. But then we get to the big one we were talking about before Facebook Live. This one was a relative latecomer, launched in August of two fifteen, and it was a controlled launch, Like, it wasn't rolled out to Facebook users at large. It was rolled out to specific movers and shakers in the entertainment industry, for example, who already had really large followings in order to kind of um boot this idea early

in the stage of of launch. Right, So, um, some big pages that had lots of followers, or entertainers personalities that had a lot of followers, they were the ones who got access to this tool first um and eventually expanded to all Apple Mobile users in January and then everybody else by February. So uh, it was a controlled rollout, which makes sense. You can actually see how it's performing

and start making tweaks before you give everyone access to it. Um. And if you haven't noticed, Facebook wants you to be watching Facebook, Uh, you really should be watching it. Yeah. There have been a lot of high profile live events that have used Facebook Live which are all in partnership with Facebook. It's not just that they coincidentally decided to use Facebook Live. These are very obviously partnerships and there's

nothing wrong with that necessarily, especially if it's transparent. But it's also interesting that UM Apparently the notifications on Facebook Live events have recently changed. It used to be that if every time we would go live on How Stuff Works, everyone who followed How Stuff worksoul get a little notification on that, and people would go and respond to it. They'd like, what's this and they'd see a video and some of them would get irritated because they get this notification. Uh,

you could turn those off. I think now. I did housetopp Works live podcast or broadcast last week, and uh, and Sherry, who is the person who kind of oversees that at our office, came in and said, Yeah, we're seeing fewer numbers or lower numbers now, but we think that might be because Facebook might be tweaking the notification system so that it's not blasting everybody the way it had been, but perhaps they were getting some negative feedback

on that. So it's still influx um now. According to their chief product officer Chris Cox, Facebook has more than a hundred people working on Facebook Live and part of what they're working on are some updates that will soon be rolling out and may very well some of them may be in place by the time you listen to this podcast. They were announced back on April UM and

we're recording in early May. So one of those features is the ability to feed to filter your live streams to only certain people on your friends list, so that way you could broadcast straight to the people that you want to talk to and and it doesn't go out

to everybody else. That could be useful if you're doing something like doing a just a quick update to folks, or you need to pass on some important news to your friends that kind of stuff, um, or just you know, you just want to show off to the jerks and accounting. I don't know, there's a lot of different possible opportunities there, I guess. Or if you're just doing your own unboxing video, nice serial unboxing video. That's my idea I've been thinking

we should do is Cereal on boxing. We're gonna we're gonna do some statistical analysis my lucky charms. Oh it's full of tricks. Wow, what's the percentage that a green clover will come out next. Um. They're also including some other filters that were present on Snapchat as well, the ability to apply visual filters to live video and scribble on the screen while you're broadcasting, which is not again that different from what we've seen with Snapchat where they

have all these different filters and overlays. You can do that on Periscope. Now you can draw on the screen. Oh yeah, the the Snapchat one has some problematic filters, ones that I think they really need to rethink before implementing again. For example, they have like they have like the face swapping stuff, which is fine where you can swap your face with some other face and then they they'll actually animate the face with your facial motions, which

is kind of creepy and interesting. But they've also done one like they had one that was a Bob Marley filter which put Bob Marley's face onto the Snapchat users face and some people said, this is getting uncomfortably close to black face. Yeah, so there's some things that that people said, like maybe we need to maybe someone needs to rethink that. That actually made a big fuss on Twitter. As a matter of fact, when that went life, Um,

that was on April by the way, when that that happened. So, um, anyway, they're also going to give the broadcaster emoji reactions that could pop up on screen, um, and a dedicated app tab just for video, and a world map that will let you find broadcasts happening around the globe, so you

can actually search for live broadcasts more easily that way. Um. So, So what I guess the question is why did Facebook want to get into this live broadcasting game when you've already got these players out there like like Twitter, Chin, Periscope and you know, all these other ones we've already talked about. Why is it that Facebook says now we've got to be the ones? Well, Facebook, Facebook's a publicly trade company, right and they want to own the world.

They want to own the world. You can only grow so much when one in seven people on the planet has a Facebook account, right. So it's one of the things they have to do is find new ways to engage users to make sure that they stay loyal to Facebook. They don't go anywhere, they don't give up on the platform. Look at Facebook all day. And by creating this Facebook Live platform, they give more reason for people to go to Facebook. They give more reason for people to create

stuff on Facebook where it lives on Facebook. It's not a link that you've dumped into Facebook. It lives there. And now you've seen other versions of this with things like Facebook articles, where now instead of sharing an article to link out to an external site to read something about the news, you can just click through to a

Facebook news page that has an article embedded. The same thing with Facebook video, right, instead of embedding a link to like a YouTube video, you can upload directly into Facebook and have it lived there. Clearly that benefits Facebook, right, I mean it's the same sort of thing. It benefits the company, and it creates more more Facebook in your Facebook,

so you can Facebook all the time, right. And you know, you could be cynical and just say like this is just a way to to leverage the users and make more money, and to some extent that is absolutely true. But it also creates more uh more features that users can actually use and enjoy and get some benefit out of. So there's it's not like it's just corporate evil. Well no, I mean they're trying to make money. I guess it depends on do you do you want to say that

in a harsh tone of voice or not. Yeah, I don't have a problem with companies trying to make money. That's the purpose for companies to exist. The problem, of course, is that if they do so without any checks or balances, because companies also by nature, are a moral uh. Despite the fact that in the United States we can talk about corporations as if they are people, they do not have any moral or ethical core to themselves. It's all

about the people who steer the company, right. Oh, I don't know, maybe Wayne Enterprises, you know, yeah, Stark Industries. So um. At any rate, the those are the big players. There are a lot of other ones that are in the space too. There are tons of apps and online services like Google Hangouts being another one that we mentioned earlier. You can do a Google hangout and broadcast to the public, and it houses that broadcast on YouTube where you can watch live and it will stay there. It can watch

it afterward too. So so we've got this trend now, and we've got all these people competing to be the biggest players, uh in the live live casting business. That you know, some people out there working in the tech industry have it in their head that the next big thing is everybody watching other people do stuff live on the internet. Is that true? Uh So one of the things we can look at is how popular is this right now? So there are some numbers I was looking

at for Periscope. Periscope, of course is is periscope. It's not the entire profile of what people are doing in terms of live video on the Internet, but it's one of the big names. So, as I said earlier in August, periscope claimed it had ten million users, which oh, yeah, that's that's not bad. But what that meant was that ten million people had registered accounts. It was about two

million people who used the app every day at that time. Also, at the same time, users were watching a combined forty one year's worth of video every single day. According to an article I found on Recode from March, that number has gone up and now the Periscope users are supposedly watching a hundred and ten years worth of video every single day. Isn't it great? These metrics we have? Yeah? Yeah, because you sit there and like, how is that possible?

Like well, matters of scale, right, you know, you just look at the number of people and then you say, well, holmeut, how much time is the average person viewing. Multiply that by the number of people who are on average using baroscope on a day. That's where you get that number. Um,

it's interesting. Uh. And there are other metrics we can talk about, Like we mentioned the Twitch one, right, the one the more than a million Twitch broadcasters, and there are a hundred million monthly visitors and that was I think back in too, so those numbers have changed obviously since then. But what about Facebook. Yeah, well, they don't really share their numbers as far as I could tell. I dug around and could not find anything. So I

imagine they're they're keeping that protected. I maybe we'll hear more when they do like a shareholders meeting. They might have some some statistics that they'll share, but at the moment we're largely in the dark. But we do know they were orderly have something like one point five billion users around the world. Uh. And from our experience, every time somebody goes live, Facebook tries to show that video

to every one of those viewers. Yeah, that se but I think I think they, like I said, I think they've scaled back on that in the in the relatively recent past, but there was definitely it still happens every time we do a live video. Yeah, there's aggressive in app promotion. They're trying to get people watching this stuff, right, and you will get comments like what is this? Who are you? Why am I seeing this? Yeah, and we're like, you know, we're just trying to go about your business.

You can, you don't have to watch this. Please, please don't be mad at me. I didn't make the algorithm. Yeah. So they obviously have a strong desire to put users eyes on live streaming video. And I can speak from personal experience and say that when you broadcast live on Facebook, uh, I feel like the number of views you reportedly get do not seem exactly to match up with the number

of viewers actively engaging through comments and liking and stuff. Now, you'd expect all the people engaging through comments and liking to to be some small subset of the total number of viewers. So I'm not thinking that every viewer would be interacting, But it seems like it's actually a very small subset compared to the number they're saying, watch to your live video. And so I'm wondering how they quantify what counts as a viewer of a live video for

a Facebook video. Well, I can tell you that. In fact, i'll tell you that right now because I have this later on in our notes, but it's pertinent to this conversation. Uh. It takes three seconds of viewing the video before Facebook counts it as a viewer. Yeah, so if you have a video playing for three seconds or longer than you are a viewer of that video. Here's the other part of that. You may have noticed that when you pull up Facebook, videos will start to auto play, not necessarily

with sound, but they'll start automatically play. And if an auto plays, for if you're on that screen for three seconds, congratulations, you've just become a Facebook viewer. So the viewer numbers can be high because it could just be that people were scrolling through their Facebook they came across the video, it started to auto play, and before they scrolled off of that screen, three seconds had passed. And then you have this rather inflated number of the viewers for your

content and it looks great. You start feeling really proud about yourself. Right. Did they end up coming up with these numbers that make some media providers on the internet just kind of salivate over this? How do they get that many million views on their live broadcast, like the big one being the BuzzFeed broadcast of the Watermelon and the Rubber bands. Are you familiar with this? Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. I didn't watch it, but I know I saw people talking about how many

views it got. It was like forty seven minute long video or something like that. But I also saw a breakdown afterwards that said, you know, this does not mean all these people watched the whole video. Most of them watched a few seconds of it. Right, It might have been that at its peak, I think there was like more than eight hundred thousand. I think at its peak

more than people are watching it but simultaneously. But then when you factor in this these different uh components, the idea that it's pre rolling as soon as you go by, and that kind of stuff, it could give a very false positive of how many people were engaged watching your material. Yeah. Uh yeah. So it's problematic with and this is not just we don't mean to just signal out Facebook. This is something that is a largely unanswered question in live

video on the Internet in general. Well, I mean it brings it brings to mind the main question for me which is is personal live video streaming here to stay as like a new may eager thing on what data is going to be flying back and forth on the on the web going into the future. Or is the current popularity more of a an inorganic industry fad that the platforms are trying to push this and people are sort of consuming it somewhat, but it's not going to stay at this level forever, or it's not going to

get much bigger. I think. I think there are certain audiences that love the live video and they will continue to love the live video. Whether that audience is broad enough for it to support the massive amount of investment we have seen from major companies and startups alike, that's another question. Um, it's one that I'm a little skeptical about.

I think there have been some people who have said that it may very well be that this ends up being a a very popular but transitory kind of fad, Like it's something where after after it has lived out its initial burst onto the scene, and we may be getting close to it. I mean, we're a year in with the mobile stuff, Um, that it'll kind of fade into something more like Yeah, it's like Twitter. Everyone knows about Twitter. A lot of people use Twitter, but it's

it's not something people are necessarily buzzing about anymore. Yeah, well, I mean I certainly think that now that we're mostly past the hardware problems, you know, now that we you can broadcast without real bandwidth issues and stuff like that, there are always going to be some people doing this. But the question for me is just how popular is it going to be? Do people really want to keep watching the standard kind of video where somebody's just say, hey,

here's my day. I'm talking into my phone. For all my peeps out there who enjoy watching me talking too

my phone. There's a lot of that going on, And I can also still see the continuing appeal for what the founder of periscope is actually talking about, meaning sort of I don't know what you call it, citizen journalism, people who are in a place where something interesting is going on, and thus it's more situational that they're broadcasting rather than that they are a standard content provider through these services. So it's more more of of an event

based thing and not a personality based thing in that case. Yeah, I mean, the personality based stuff clearly has a place as well, simply because the interactive factor, right, if you are giving an audience the chance to interact with someone they admire for whatever reason, someone they find entertaining or informative or whatever, then that's a very powerful experience, much more so that, I would argue than watching a static video.

I mean static video is probably the wrong term, but a prerecorded video where you know, yes, you can watch a horror movie and say don't go in there, but you know that they can hear you. But if you're doing a live video, like I think a live video walk through a haunted house for someone's you like, don't go in there, and like, you know what, that's a great idea, I'm going to turn around and go the

other way, you know, the ruin it. Yeah, I imagine if you could interact with the horror movie, you'd ruin it. You'd say don't go in there, they'd say okay, and then they'd leave, and then it would be boring. No, no, no, you you always you always have to have a backup zombie in the yard. You know, you gotta have, you gotta have, you gotta have your backup monsters so that

no matter what, you're gonna encounter a dangerous situation. But but no, the interactivity does I think add a lot of value to this experience, and if they, if the various providers out there continue to find interesting ways to boost interactivity, I think we could see this sticking around

for a good long while. It maybe that we have m another period, like I said, kind of like YouTube, where we see a huge rush of of broadcasters out there and it may shake out where they're are a handful, you know, maybe a hundred really well known broadcasters, and then there's everyone else and discovery becomes incredibly challenging. I think that's gonna be the like we said at the top of the show, I think it's gonna be the

biggest hurdle for live casting. But I think live casting is definitely here to stay, and especially as we get even more sophisticated UM streaming opportunities. It's gonna be built into everything, just like cameras were built into lots of stuff, Just like you know, voice activation has been built into

a lot of stuff. We're gonna see more and more of these being incorporated directly into products, like like the fact when when the PlayStation four came out and there's a button on the controller for you to start broadcasting on Twitch. That's a huge message that live casting is definitely a big deal. So, uh yeah, I expect that we're gonna see more of this, at least in the near future. Um, it will be really interesting if it

continues to be largely unregulated, you know. That's the other question is will there come a point where the government of the United States decides to step in and pass some regulations? Can't wait? I mean that it's already happening in other parts of the world, So the question is will it happen in the US and and you know, in Europe and that kind of thing. And there are a lot of different things to consider, Like when I

do my walk where I'm periscoping. As I walk around, I try very hard to not show off too much of the neighborhoods I'm in out of the concern for the privacy of the people who live there. But that's me trying to be thoughtful. There's nothing to guard against that if I were to, If I wanted to, I could just walk up to a house periscope live there and say, right, the jerk, the jerk who lives here, their dog poops on my yard. So here's their address, everybody.

I mean, I could do that, and that would be really crappy of the for them. Yeah, that would be that's the nice way of of of of harassing that person. But yeah, in the innocent day, yes. Uh So I'm hopeful that that largely the communities will be self regulating and self policing because, uh, otherwise, you're gonna have to have government agencies come into this and start to make rules, and that's going to make the whole thing harder to access,

um and and that that would be a shame. But at the same time, I definitely would be concerned about the privacy and safety of people who had not consented to be in a live video and they're not in a public space. Um. If they're in a public space, that's one thing, but if they're in like in their own yard, that's something else. Entirely. At any rate, this

is an interesting conversation, and obviously it's still developing. We're really gonna have to pay attention and see if we end up going down a m a pathway where everyone is having this awesome communication and we have more access than ever to all these amazing events, some some awesome and some awful around the world, or if he'll turn into like a black mirror situation and we'll be regretting the fact that we ever developed the transistor in the

first place. UM, I'm curious about it, and I want to know what you guys think too, Like, what what are your views on this whole live casting thing are you? Are you a fan? Do you create stuff? Do you watch stuff? Do you watch our stuff? If you don't, you should, uh and let us know. Send that's a message. Our email addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook and Twitter we are f W Thinking.

On Facebook, you can just search fw thinking in that little search bar will pop right up and you can leave us a message and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,