Beyond Vine, Live Video Today
back-arrow

Bye-bye, Vine. The world of real-time, self-publishing continues to evolve. Next Tuesday, Jan. 17, Twitter’s once-loved, six-second, video-looping app goes the way of the dinosaur. Launched in 2012, it’s being wiped from existence as we know it. But this time not by a meteor or climate change. By ever-better, social video-sharing services.

Top competitors in the crowded marketspace for live-streaming, real-time apps are jockeying for position and bumping into each other as they scramble for ways to make their apps more customizable. Letting you use filters for added creativity and pop. Broadcasting to specific followers. Searching for videos by topic, location or broadcaster. If you have Wi-Fi or a 4G connection, you’re in business.

  • Facebook Live lets you broadcast video for up to four hours while simultaneously answering questions, listening to concerns and gauging reactions. It gives you the ability to archive and replay highlights of a past live stream. (In comparison, Instagram’s option is in-the-moment only.)

screen-shot-2017-01-11-at-11-33-41-am

  • Periscope, owned by Twitter, has proven itself as not just a medium for content, but for connection. Those heart streams provide a visual means of seeing how people are responding to your scope (i.e. video) – either within the app or on Twitter. Periscope doesn’t archive the content, but third-party provider Fullscope.tv let you capture and download scopes, while Katch.me enables you to aggregate and store them on a page with your user name.
GE pushes out Periscope videos on Twitter.
GE pushes out Periscope videos on Twitter.
  • Hype, developed by Vine’s founders, offers Periscope-like simplicity with features similar to Facebook Live. Sparkles lets users indicate approval with effervescing stars (like Periscope’s hearts). It keeps a running tally of viewers and sparkles.
  • Instagram Stories launched late 2016 by Instagram, owned by Facebook. Users can broadcast to followers for an hour at a time – and when the recording ends, the broadcast disappears, with no way to watch again.
  • Snapchat recorded more than 7 billion views per day and more than 100 million active daily users in 2016, five years after its launch. Unlike the video platforms mentioned above, Snapchat offers both private messaging and mass sharing to the followers of your choosing. Stories only stick around for 24 hours, where a private message is gone the second it finishes playing. That makes robust analytics impossible. Still, Snapchat reigns as one of the best online word-of-mouth engines for everyone from Gen Y to Gen X.

And if you find yourself still hankering for Vine, a vestige lives on as Vine Camera. It lets you shoot and post short loops on Twitter. And, you can always visit the Vine website to watch older uploads, which continue to be archived there. And, if you have a Vine video still in need of publishing, do it fast, before January 17. For more information, visit  http://vine.co/FAQ. screen-shot-2017-01-11-at-12-03-06-pm This column ran in the January 12th issue of BlueSky Business Aviation News.