Thanks for putting this together — found it thought-provoking.

One of the biggest things with live is that it has to have an advantage over asynchronous content, and so far there are two instances where that’s true: results-based content (e.g. sports, the bachelor, anything where knowing the result negatively affects the viewing experience) and content where there’s a real-time community or creator interaction that’s lost in asynchronous consumption.

The point around passive consumption as a secondary attention option is interesting, and Houseparty / Twitch seem like the best examples of this so far.

The strategy with both of these is pretty different, though, from what Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have been doing with live so far. By pushing for regular people without large followings to go live, they’ve unintentionally created a negative feedback loop where as a creator, you start a video, no one joins (or 1–2 random people join), and it’s a subpar experience for both creator and consumer — and one that doesn’t encourage them to do it again.

HQ as a live offering is very different from the social use case of Live — they take advantage of the second advantage of live vs. asynchronous content, from above: audience interaction. While they’ll likely try to branch out into other games/live content, the cult of personality around Scott and the ability to create a community around dozens of games (as they’d have to if they were actually trying to do 24/7 content ) would mean pretty massive dilution in numbers and likely quality, and it’s hard to imagine it scaling to the point of reaching an IPO, but who knows. Either way, live within HQ isn’t the one-to-few model encouraged by current social offerings (the comments tab is a completely unusable disaster with hundreds of thousands of people vying for milliseconds of attention) — it’s a pretty different one-to-many beast that takes advantage of the differentiating advantage of live: audience interaction.