Streaming For The Moment

Let’s say you’re a retail brand looking to get a foothold in social commerce. You’re a smart brand, and you know that video is where it’s at — particularly among the young folks. So you allocate a significant portion of your marketing budget toward videos hosted on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and, of course, Facebook.

You’re in business, right? All you have to do now is just sit back and count the money coming in …

Wait, those aren’t live videos? Those are, like, recordings of things that already happened?

Might as well be cave paintings. Your marketing budget just went down the toilet. And here we thought you were a smart brand.

OK … perhaps the situation isn’t quite as dire as that hypothetical portends. But the prevailing belief in the world of social commerce is that 2016 (the year that’s already almost two months old, mind you) will be the year of live streaming.

With live streaming content on Twitter-owned Periscope being watched at an aggregate of 40 years’ worth per day, YouTube working on a way to live stream 360-degree videos, and Facebook having made its live stream feature — Facebook Live — available to all iPhone users in the U.S., for a significant (and ever-growing) portion of forward-thinking consumers (and contributors), social video that isn’t live is effectively …

Well, if not dead, exactly … it’s a little under the weather and its friends are worried about it.

Given that social media is about people sharing — with friends, family members, vague acquaintances and not a small amount of complete strangers — what’s happening in their lives “at the moment,” arguably no technology presently does better to remove the quotes from that phrase, and make it quite literal, than live streaming video.

For consumer-facing retail brands, therefore, the monetary potential of the emerging trend is nothing to shake a stick at — especially in cases where live streaming videos are being housed at a platform with a preexisting (and massive) audience, like Facebook.

As InPlayer points out, even before the wide launch of Facebook Live, the social media giant had 100 million hours of video being streamed to users each day. With 80 percent of the platform’s ad revenue coming from mobile, its live streaming offering — which is, by its very nature, custom-made for users who are out and about — is positioned to drive that number on mobile devices even higher.

Just as Facebook had previously monetized content on Instagram (which itself offers an “of the moment” feature, Instagram Explore), Twitter, the Motley Fool explains, had already done the same for Periscope, whose streams are integrated into the timelines of Twitter’s 320 million users with its ad-targeting tools.

As well as Twitter had been (and is) doing — for its advertisers and, therefore, itself — with the nascent offering of live streaming, Facebook now entering the space in full is likely to take some of the shine of off Periscope.

As Adobe Social’s Carmen Sutter commented to TechRepublic earlier this year, “In 2015, Facebook got really serious about video, and I think 2016 is the year where they will just dominate.”

That might also be unwelcome news, regarding potential market share in the realm of live streaming, for YouTube. While the social video mainstay’s aforementioned tinkering with 360-degree video dates back almost a year, the fact is, as Buzzfeed points out, not too many 360-degree cameras currently available can stream live video effectively. And by the time that YouTube sorts out the numerous difficulties in making the creation of 360-degree live streams accessible to a wide consumer audience …

Well, Facebook — which began opening up its own 360-degree video format to advertisers in November — will likely be able to do the same.

Given that Facebook’s user numbers and reach are above YouTube’s, Sutter also said to TechRepublic that she thinks ”video, moving into 360 and trying to be trendsetters, that’s going to happen on Facebook. It’s not going to happen on YouTube, and I think that’s the other reason why it’ll be Facebook’s year when it comes to video.”

Man, Facebook. It’s like the company is making it harder for its competitors to live in the moment.