From e-commerce to corporate events, marketing to socializing, live streaming has seen a rise in popularity across a multitude of industries. So, let’s take a look at some of the ideas and innovations that have come from this phenomenon.
Virtual Avatars
Typically, live streams are hosted by a real human, be it a webinar, social media livestream, or even live entertainment. Take something like online casinos, for example – live casino offerings like Crazy Time at Paddy’s are hosted in real-time, with real players. The host spins the game show-style wheel in the studio, which is streamed to the players in real-time, allowing for an authentic and immersive digital casino experience.
Though this does allow digital platforms to host a multitude of different sessions throughout the day with a sense of human connection, we’re only human! This means we need to take breaks, eat, sleep, and can only work a set amount of time every day. That’s why some platforms are turning to virtual hosts. These virtual hosts can appear in many forms – one of which is avatars.
Over the past couple of years, the quality of design of these avatars has skyrocketed, allowing companies to now test virtual avatars that look and act like real humans. The human-based virtual avatars can even be designed from scratch with complex algorithms that command human-like behavior. These virtual avatars have the potential to provide a sense of human connection and authentic interactions but without the associated limitations. For example, they could even host yoga classes all day, every day without getting tired.
Source: Pixabay
Chatbots
Another type of virtual hosts plays upon a similar idea to artificial intelligence (AI) models like ChatGPT, integrating AI chatbots into live streaming. Over the past few years, chatbots have seen a huge rise in popularity. According to Yahoo Finance, the market size of chatbots amounted to $4.6 billion in 2022, and is expected to rise to $32.4 billion by 2023 at a compound annual growth rate of 21.6%.
It is no surprise, then, that innovators are looking for ways to integrate chatbot technology into live streams. Here, chatbots can help to manage high levels of engagement and provide answers to viewer questions, allowing the real people to focus on other elements of the live stream.
On top of this, some businesses are even trialing AI chatbots alongside virtual avatars. This could essentially automate and digitize the entire process, allowing live streams to run 24/7 with barely any need for human intervention.
3D Live Streaming
Source: Pixabay
With the rise of the Metaverse, the introduction of virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) streaming in 3D has posed the question of when 3D functionality could make its way into the world of live streaming.
According to Venture Beat, the downside of current live-streaming technology is that it is limited by the devices and infrastructure it operates through. Though smart devices are making traditional live streaming more accessible, these devices do not currently support 3D streaming.
That said, the same AR and VR technology that is revolutionizing social media, capturing and streaming 3D videos directly into the Metaverse, could theoretically eventually be used to support 3D live streaming should they reach the same degree of mass adoption.
So, there you have it – just a few innovative technologies that are being fuelled by the rising popularity of live streaming. As to whether these technologies will one day become the norm, we will just have to wait and see.
