How Live Streaming Is Shaping-the Industry What We Can Expect The Future To Look Like

Live streaming is evolving as one of the primary ways to share and receive information in real-time. Thanks to Facebook and Instagram Live, and other emerging live streaming platforms, live streaming has become an important strategy in the social media marketing landscape. With so much competition in the industry, live streams are one of the most effective ways to narrate your brand story and bring forth the real side of your brand to your potential customers. Moreover, the live streaming industry is projected to reach $70.05 billion by 2021 which predicts the bright future of the technology.

Let’s look into how live streaming is currently shaping the industry and how it impacts the future of digital media.

How live streaming shapes up new trends in the media industry?

While brands find live streaming content beneficial for boosting reach and engagement, viewers also find live videos entertaining as they can see a chance to view the live, authentic, and raw videos from industry experts or their favorite influencers. In 2019, over 1.1 billion hours of live video was watched by internet users and 47% more video viewers across the globe are streaming more live streams in 2018 than in 2017.

When it comes to live streaming benefits for brands, over 35% of marketers leverage live video as a part of their social media marketing strategy. And 82% of viewers prefer live broadcasts from the brands they love over general social media posts.

Due to such reception from both brands and consumers, social media platforms have been rolling out live streaming functionalities in their platforms to stay competitive in the market and to drive revenue. If you ask why live streaming services are quickly gaining momentum, it brings in a very significant thing- Accessibility. Live streaming allows online users to easily broadcast live about anything they like so that they can connect with their friends, peers, family, or any viewers who are sitting at a remote location. Businesses can also leverage live streaming to connect with their team and carry out virtual meetings to communicate and collaborate with their remote workforce. Moreover, live streaming is a great way to generate revenue with your content offerings whether you are an independent streamer or an enterprise.

The only essential thing you must have in order to create a successful live streaming strategy is unique content offers. Live streaming allows you to be creative and offer the flexibility to choose a wide variety of content to broadcast live. The best thing about live streaming is that you don’t have to worry about pre-editing your videos and make it appealing to your audience. Because, live streaming by its very nature is raw and your viewers are looking exactly for the same.

Predictions on live streaming

In this section, let’s look into what we can expect from live streaming and how live streaming is shaping up new trends in the media industry. On the enterprise side, businesses are focusing more on cloud computing, AI, and security features when using live streaming technology. Whereas on the consumer side, there is increased Smartphone usage, 5G technology, and an increasing reception for live streaming. Here are some of the expert predictions on live streaming and how it impacts the future of live streaming industry.

More opportunities for enterprise streaming

One of the top live streaming trends will be the experimentation of enterprises with live streaming technology. More brands are experimenting with live streaming technology by hosting product launches live, investing in influencer marketing, broadcasting live interviews, and a wide range of content types. The adoption of this trend is supported by industry giants, too. For example, Microsoft has integrated intelligent live event capabilities in Microsoft 365 suit. This functionality allows you to create live events in Microsoft Streams and Teams where your team or audience is. These kinds of live streaming integrations have narrowed down the barriers for businesses of all sizes to use live streaming to facilitate real-time communication with employees, clients, and customers. Enterprise live streaming presents plenty of lucrative opportunities for business growth and increased ROI.

Provides lucrative opportunities for advertisers

Live streaming provides businesses lucrative opportunities to reach out to a broad audience regardless of their niche. With live broadcasting, you can easily gather demographic and geographical data to know the details of your target audience.

Live streaming analytics also allow advertisers to understand their target audience with the help of contextual targeting. Live broadcasting in all of its forms presents new ways for advertisers to reach the audience through impactful and engaging live streams that most consumers are interested in. Due to the nature of live streaming, advertisers receive more exposure for their advertising content.

As most people tune in to live videos, advertisers can gain massive amounts of exposure and can target a more specific audience who are more likely to be engaged with.

Smartphones make live streaming easy

The future of Smartphone and digital devices along with the rising popularity of live streaming technology is making the market lucrative by opening up new opportunities. The availability of reliable internet connections for an affordable cost along with the introduction of 5G will allow people to broadcast more live streaming in the best possible quality from anywhere across the globe, anytime, and from the devices of their choice. Live streaming services are constantly making more efforts to improve live broadcasts by combining minimal data with optimal and high-quality performance. All of this contributes to the bright future of the live streaming industry.

Artificial intelligence will have a serious impact

Live streaming features offer businesses and individuals more opportunities to reach out to a global audience base, engage with each other. As more live videos are recorded and broadcasted live, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a significant role in monitoring, enhancing, and customizing interactive videos. AI doesn’t just make the interactive live streaming space safer, it is beneficial in pushing both audio and video quality to new heights.

Both Netflix and YouTube already use machine learning to optimize the encoding aspects for each video on their sites. Live streaming platforms like Facebook are integrating AI to detect and remove harmful content using image analysis techniques like object detection and image classification.

Strategy for live streaming

Businesses leverage live streaming in various ways to connect and collaborate with their audience in real-time. From industry events to product launches, brands broadcast important events in a way we haven’t seen before. This gives the audience chances to participate in the event virtually giving marketing immediate feedback of the event or a campaign. A live broadcast is more ubiquitous; brands are inventing unique ways to stream live videos. Many businesses are entering the live streaming market and some even use drones to broadcast big events opening up a whole new dimension to the future of live streaming.

As we move to 2021, live streaming trends are increasingly becoming more prominent setting an industry standard for promoting and growing your business.

That is why most enterprises choose to invest in live streaming solutions. If you are planning to integrate live streaming into your online video streaming business plan, you must make a detailed live streaming strategy that defines the entire process. Here are some of the things to consider when devising a live streaming strategy.

Understand and study the market

The very first thing you need to consider when choosing to integrate live streaming into your marketing strategy is to analyze and study the market in depth. Whether you are starting out or looking to expand your live streaming strategies, conducting market research will help you decide when to start and to how to navigate. Learn about what other brands are experimenting with live streaming and what things that constitute a successful live streaming strategy are.

List down essential capabilities you require

The next important thing to consider would be the live streaming solution you require. If you are planning to upgrade from free social media live streaming platforms, you must consider investing in a live streaming solution. In that case, you must plan on the entail capabilities you require in a live streaming solution. For example, start with planning on how you envision a perfect live streaming session. Are you planning to use a green screen or animation titles? Do you want to add your customized branding or add more security features? What type of monetization strategy do you want to integrate into your live streaming solution?

Focus on the workflow

Your workflow has a direct impact on how you produce your live streams. For example, whether you are shooting with a single cam or multiple cams or feeding an unedited video strategy to consider, all of these will have a direct impact on your live broadcasts. Consider the workflow so that you can plan on how your live streaming platform looks and feel in the context of your business workflow.

Conclusion

Live streaming is a powerful technology with a huge potential to support the marketing efforts of brands due to its real-time nature that is more engaging and interactive. There is a reason why enterprises and industry giants are launching live campaigns designed especially for their product launches and important events to engage with both new and existing customer base.

If there is one thing that industry experts agree upon, it is that live streaming is going to grow at a steady pace at least for another decade without any slowing down. Barriers are narrowing down, making it easy for everyone to access and broadcast live streaming. This implies that more players will enter the live streaming landscape, bringing in more unique and creative ideas.