Why The Internet Landscape In 2019 Is Overshadowed By Live Streaming?

Nagesh Banga currently serves as the Deputy Country Manager at Bigo Live. He is responsible for formulating and implementing the strategic plan, driving growth and innovation, and ensuring that the company continues to lead in the region. The key functional areas that he is involved with are Marketing, Business Development, P&L etc.

- Nagesh Banga

Live Streaming - a dream of yesteryears' innovators in the digital field is now considered as an inevitable gamechanger in the social media landscape. In 2017, many experts from around the globe acknowledged live streaming as the ultimate future on social media platforms and today 28 percent of internet users from around the globe spend time watching live videos and they are spending 3x of their online surfing time to watch videos. To understand the buzz around the concept of live streaming let look into the history of video and its evolution along with various other factors contributing to the popularity of live streaming.

The Evolution of Video Content

While the rest of the world experienced growth in consumption of video content early in 2006-7 with YouTube's acquisition by Google, launch of video sharing feature on Facebook, and more. In India, video consumption, TV channels' streaming online and other video streaming platforms experienced a boost with the introduction of data plans by Reliance Jio in 2015 at extremely low prices as compared to other data plans. Many attribute the growth in internet usage in India to Reliance and their disruptive data distribution strategy. Today, India accounts for 12 percent of the world's total population using the Internet, and data usage in 2019 has doubled as compared to last year.