Livestreaming sector spurs collective sharing, innovation
Cadres in Qianjin Village, Liaoning Province sell products via live-streaming platforms. Photo: Lin Lin/PROVIDED TO CSST
The livestreaming sector will form deeper and wider group networks and broaden a new vision featuring collective sharing and innovation, thus re-expressing social values.
New landscape
Livestreaming approaches have brought new life to government services. In this regard, livestreaming video showrooms open up a public space for open discussion, and engage government staff with general society through instant communication. Live broadcasts create opportunities for people to be seen and heard. People now take the initiative to obtain government information, instead of passively informed. Government departments’ streaming video is more than an informative conference, but also a public relations event.
Video showrooms are reflective of people’s livelihoods, public opinions, cadres’ conduct, and a touchstone for government services quality. Linking the strengths of live broadcasts and government services expands citizens’ right to know, participate, express, and supervise. This move can involve more types of social governance subjects, improve administrative ecology, and elevate administrative efficiency.
Also, live broadcasting has added development channels for a wide range of sectors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the stay-at-home economy, a buzzword which is now well-known, found a new vent in livestreaming. People from all walks of life embraced this medium to sell products, teach classes, and conduct meetings, reaching out to more users and resuming work, production, and school. Livestreaming e-commerce broadens consumption scenarios and creates fresh opportunities for traditional sectors.
In video showrooms, people can go shopping, sell property, purchase vehicles, as well as visit tourist spots and museums. Livestreaming video has become a new way to learn at home. People have widely promoted and applied online teaching. The accelerated development of the “live plus” mode intersects sectors like e-commerce, education, culture, and entertainment, fueling their vertical development patterns. It connects upstream and downstream of the industrial chain and motivates online and offline interaction.
Online culture is nurtured by the livestreaming sector. In the past few years, live broadcasting has grown into a “self-help kit” for the cultural industry. Cinemas, variety shows, and physical bookstores have turned to digital transformation and started a virtual or “cloud-based model.” Live broadcasting has accelerated the integration of traditional culture and new media, allowing traditional culture to disseminate beyond study rooms and reach out to ordinary people.
Also, it decreases the impact of spatial distance between people, and forms an eye-catching media event. Live broadcasts have gathered into a lively cultural market, and people are shuttled between the video showrooms as if they were enjoying a flowing feast. During the pandemic, cultural livestreaming events brought life into dull pictures, adding color and fun to the stay-at-home period.
The booming livestreaming sector leads to closer social ties. The arrival of a mobile live-broadcast era has transformed social interactions via more convenient dialogue, more timely feedback, video-based presentations, and colloquial speech. These changes allow people to communicate online in a similar way to talking face-to-face in real life.
The video streaming industry develops quasi-social relationships between users that live far away. Viewers can become involved in streaming stars’ discourse and emotions in daily lives, attaining a sense of satisfaction that is equal to physical social interactions. Meanwhile, features such as real-time participation and scene extension allow users from different regions to meet and connect in the showrooms. In this way, relationships are more easily established. Also, social networks are woven tighter.
In addition, video streaming promotes public welfare activities. A scene-based live broadcast makes it easier for viewers to generate a sense of presence, and the suffering of others becomes concrete, as if within reach. Interaction connects individuals with others’ fates, so far-away places or anonymous faces become relevant to individuals. By amplifying causes using celebrity fame, livestreaming plays the role of demonstrating compassion and enhances the public’s willingness to participate, which creates a cultural atmosphere that emphasizes public good.
Communication via video livestreaming is closer to a physical conversation, lowering the users’ cognitive threshold and allowing the public to more easily understand public welfare activities in a shorter time. It ensures the real-time presentation of public welfare activities, enhances transparency, and makes it easier for users to supervise the process.
Promotion methods
First, we must uphold proper values and disseminate excellent content. Vivid content created by daily life remains the primary engine for livestreaming platforms. Under this logic, video broadcasting serves as a tool that feeds appetites for entertainment and leisure.
With profound historical and cultural heritage, rooted in real life, content that conveys rich human experiences and value pursuits can often survive fierce competition. Users’ consumption demands are constantly escalating. They have shifted from “passively” receiving entertainment recommendations to “actively” searching for content that may help improve themselves. Knowledge- and service-intensive content can steer livestreaming platforms to emphasize high-quality production. This form of transformation will become a future trend.
The upgrades in technological applications will likely give rise to holographic experiences. From text to pictures, from radio and television to online videos, media technology has facilitated communication activities that can take place anytime and anywhere while reshaping communication between people. New infrastructures such as 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain have brought new speeds and dimensions to media experiences.
Regarding the scale of connection, 5G livestreaming can greatly extend user coverage and achieve visualization throughout industry and society. As for the depth of connection, changes in objects, relationships, and methods will spur stronger creativity, resulting in new technological applications and usage scenarios.
The construction of new technologies, represented by artificial intelligence and blockchain, will further hone the industry. In an era where everything happens on screen, each individual will be a witness and respond in real-time. Live broadcast, powered by technology, will contribute to a more magnificent holographic experience.
Digital transformation is poised to bolster industrial integration and restructuring. In the foreseeable future, livestreaming will influence more economic fields and become one of the mainstream sales models, advancing industrial integration and restructuring. Livestreaming will gradually extend from the sales link to the entire chain of brand building, production, and supply, encouraging more brands, suppliers, and individual merchants to open online businesses. Meanwhile, live broadcasts will meet consumers’ more diverse needs by improving content. Traditional offline sales models largely focus on product cost-effectiveness and utilization traits.
However, when consumers shop online, many expect product content to be professional, interesting, and of high quality. Therefore, future livestreaming sales will not only increase product categories, but will also explore upgrades on multiple fronts such as content, form, and style.
Meanwhile, improvement of media literacy matters a lot. For future livestreaming industries, improving collective media literacy rests upon two aspects. First, the sector should recognize the need to cultivate practitioners’ abilities to learn and use relevant technologies, to raise general awareness and understanding of their profession. Also, the public should better recognize, distinguish and comprehend content and technical services on livestreaming platforms.
In addition, regulatory management should go from strength to strength. Targeting the livestreaming sector, government departments have successively enacted multiple regulations and normative documents, clarifying institutional requirements on such aspects as access policy, content censorship, filing systems, streaming comments or “bullet” comments, and management of streaming-influencers.
As the livestreaming industry is increasingly linking with social, economic, political, and cultural activities, cross-cutting regulatory policies are being introduced successively, which is bound to become a new supervision trend. For example, the “Code of Conduct for Online Livestreaming Marketing,” based on the advertising law in China, explicates the responsibilities and obligations of merchants, platforms, live streamers, and live-streaming service organizations.
Traffic fraud and other issues in the sector have drawn attention from the Intellectual Property Office, the Consumer Association, and the Advertising Association. In the context of joint management, healthy and sustainable cooperation will grow into the mainstream development pattern of the livestreaming industry in the future.
Wang Xiaohong is from the Teaching Affairs Department at the Communication University of China. Bao Yuanyuan is from the State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication at the same university.
Edited by MA YUHONG
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