Vicariously Experiencing it all Without Going Outside

Abstract

The livestreaming industry in China is gaining greater traction than its European and North American counterparts and has a profound impact on the stakeholders' online and offline lives. An emerging genre of livestreaming that has become increasingly popular in China is outdoor livestreaming. With outdoor livestreams, streamers broadcast outdoor activities, travel, or socialize with passersby in outdoor settings, often for 6 or more hours, and viewers watch such streams for hours each day. However, given that professionally produced content about travel and outdoor activities are not very popular, it is currently unknown what makes this category of livestreams so engaging and how these techniques can be applied to other content or genres. Thus, we conducted a mixed methods study consisting of a survey (N=287) and interviews (N = 20) to understand how viewers watch and engage with outdoor livestreams in China. The data revealed that outdoor livestreams encompass many categories of content, environments and passersby behaviors create challenges and uncertainty for viewers and streamers, and viewers watch livestreams for surprising lengths of time (e.g., sometimes more than 5 continuous hours). We also gained insights into how live commenting and virtual gifting encourage engagement. Lastly, we detail how the behaviors of dedicated fans and casual viewers differ and provide implications for the design of livestreaming services that support outdoor activities.

The promise and peril of parallel chat in video meetings for work

“…Hosts have learned to permeate their streams with audience engagement techniques in the chat [13, 58] [57], but the chat is also rife with abuse and spam that is amplified by imitation, such that hosts have also had to learn how to shape pro and anti-social behavior with moderation and example-setting [53]. Livestreaming services themselves are developing more holistic multi-modal experiences, such as "Danmaku", in which text and reactions float over video [36,37,40,59]. Danmaku concepts have not yet made the jump to parallel chat in commercial video meeting systems, with the exception of floating reactions and hand-raising [43].…”

Who Watches Live Streaming in China? Examining Viewers’ Behaviors, Personality Traits, and Motivations

“…As social interaction is emphasized in SLSSs use, many studies have documented social interaction as a major motivation for live streaming use ( Hu et al, 2017 ; Wohn et al, 2018 ). For example, social interaction motivates people to watch different content genres from game streams ( Sjöblom and Hamari, 2017 ) to outdoor and real-life streams ( Lu et al, 2019b ). Hilvert-Bruce et al (2018) found that, on Twitch, viewers who preferred small channels were more motivated by social engagement than those who preferred larger channels.…”

Travel live streaming: an affordance perspective

“…Viewers using the live channel can interact with the travel live streamer contemporaneously. For example, Lu et al ( 2019 ) investigated outdoor live streaming using the Chinese online platform, Douyu, to understand user experiences, such as hiking and fishing. Given its unique features (real-time viewing experience and interaction), TLS has gained popularity on major social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, YouTube).…”

“…This paper adopts the position that the use of live streaming is a socio-technological phenomenon that depicts the relationship between participants’ social behaviours (e.g., live streamer–viewers interaction) and the technological environment (Lu et al 2019 ). Cabiddu et al ( 2014 ) pointed out that affordances are a powerful means to study socio-technical phenomena.…”