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Horus VR developed a low latency VR livestreaming platform called VRiend. VRiend enables patients and isolated people to reconnect and communicate with their beloved ones outside the hospital. Patients could go back to school and follow lessons again, attend business meeting at work to stay up to speed with their colleagues or just have a chat with their grandchildren back home.

Live streaming platforms have become popular media for young people in China to interact with others. While the synchronized interaction with live streamers through comments is said to make users feel more engaged than simply watching a video, it also brings the risk of online violence when the words become highly negative. By integrating the social-judgment-based opinion dynamic model (SJBO) with other theories like information overload and entertainment motivation, I modeled the opinion evolution during live streaming to analyze the opinion polarization. When no extremists exist initially, the simulation results reveal the possibility of opinion polarization when the audiences have low thresholds for repulsion. When positive and negative extremists are involved initially, the results suggest that their proportions among the audiences are responsible for the ratios of the positive or negative polarization of the ordinary audiences, which verifies the rationale of controlling the number of extremists to reduce opinion polarization. The impacts from other model parameters are also discussed in the research.

Encouraged by the technological breakthrough of the hyper-modern era, social livestreaming has arisen as one of the most engaging communities in recent years, enabling live content production and instant based interaction. As a result, with the growing popularity of the gaming industry, video game live streaming is expected to induce a new and yet unprecedented surge in the digital landscape, especially with the development of online platforms, such as Twitch.TV, YouTube gaming and Facebook Gaming etc., allowing a real-time content dissemination and consumption. Therefore, with the proliferation of video game live streaming and the increasing number of gamers and professional players worldwide, this paper examines viewer engagement in live video-game streaming platforms. Although few researchers have addressed the subject, our aim is to outline users’ motivations, as highlighted in the literature, as well as forms of engagement in these services through a case study of Twitch.TV and YouTube Gaming platforms. Moreover, as discussed in communication and social computing literature, we address the importance of chat messages through IRC in fostering simultaneous interaction with the streamer and other peers.

Live streaming is one of the most popular Internet activities. Nowadays, there has been an increase in free live streaming (FLS) services that provide unauthorized broadcasting of live events, attracting millions of viewers. These opportunistic providers often have modest network infrastructures, and monetize their services through advertising and data analytics, which raises concerns about the performance, quality of experience, and user privacy when using these services. In this paper, we measure and analyze the behaviour of 20 FLS sports sites on Android smartphones, focusing on packet-level, video player, and privacy aspects. In addition, we compare FLS services with two legitimate online sports networks. Our measurement results show that FLS sites suffer from scalability issues during highly-popular events, deliver lower QoE than legitimate providers, and often use obscure and/or suspicious tracking services. Caution is thus advised when using FLS services.

As mentioned in the previous chapters, domain-specific clouds and particularly the MSC platform take advantage of heterogeneous systems for their compute engine. The virtualization platform to enable isolation across users is another dimension of the computing engine in the MSC platform. In this chapter, we investigate how heterogeneous machines can be efficiently harnessed to maximize the QoE and minimize the cost in the MSC platform. In addition, the overhead of various virtualization platforms is analyzed. The chapter is concluded by providing a case-study on how heterogeneous computing is used in practice for live streaming.

The rise in the number of mobile-connected devices and the emergence of new streaming models, such as on-demand, on-the-go, and interactive streaming, has an impact on the viewing practice of consumers. Mobile devices will play a major role in new viewing habit changes. In this paper, we present a generic framework for developing custom live streaming multimedia apps for mobile devices, i.e., we identify the principal characteristics of mobile live streaming apps, the components, components’ interactions, and the design decision needed to create such apps. To demonstrate how the generic framework can be used, we created an app for live streaming audio for Android devices using URLs. The app acts as an instance of the framework and validates it. The paper has two main contributions: (1) the generic framework which can be adapted when developing live streaming multimedia apps or similar apps and (2) developers and end users can reuse the instance app to their own specific needs using live streaming URLs.

With the wide spread of smart handheld device and the rapid development of Internet technology, the opportunity for global population to use live broadcast technology across screens has been increasing. Traditional ways of watching TV news via cable or air broadcasting are no longer the primary media receiving channel for users. In fact, in the modern era, many media corporates also provide instant and fast news to the public by using different communication channels on different devices. By adopting the behavior of cross-screen live streaming news watching, the authors hope to explore innovative interaction styles with users and, at the same time, increase their cross-screen user experience. The purpose of this study is to explore the users’ task performance regarding information search while conducting cross-screen interactions. The experiment was a two-factor mixed factorial design, i.e. 2 (viewing style) × 2 (graphic/text focus). A total of four prototypes were created for the experiment. Twelve participants were invited to take part in the experiment by convenient sampling method. The participants were asked to conduct five tasks. Among them, two of the participants’ task performance were collected for further statistical analysis. After the tasks were conducted, each participant was required to answer the questionnaire of System Usability Scale (SUS), NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), and subjective preference. A semi-structured interview was also conducted after the participant completed the experimental tasks.

Social live streaming services (SLSSs), a kind of synchronous social\ud networking service, are slowly but surely becoming a part of people’s daily lives. To keep users interested, a wide range of gamification elements are implemented on these services, increasing the user engagement and changing their behavior. This study examined 20 different SLSS mobile applications and the applied gamification elements. A literature review as well as a content analysis were used to find appropriate SLSS apps and game elements. What kind of mechanics can be found on SLSS mobile apps and how many are implemented on each system? On three of the observed apps we could identify all game elements. Chinese SLSS apps are the most gamified ones. On Ustream, no game element is implemented. The game mechanics following others as well as customization are the most often\ud applied; capturing a moment of a stream is the least often implemented.

With flow dividend of traditional e-commerce is diminishing gradually, the growth rate of e-commerce users is slowing down, the major e-commerce platforms are in great need of content innovation and new flow portals. E-commerce live streaming has become one of the breakthroughs for the platforms. Its growth prospects depend on whether the live streaming users can turn into orders. Based on the characteristics of China’s e-commerce live streaming platforms and users, this paper explores the impact of e-commerce live streaming on consumers’ purchase intentions under the mobile Internet environment. During e-commerce live streaming, consumers are likely to produce a herd effect, thus influencing their purchase intention. Results show that perceived ease of use, situational factors and follow others’ behavior significant impact on purchase intention, perceived usefulness of influence on purchase intention is lesser, incomplete information will not directly affect consumer’s purchase intention, but by following others it might affect their purchase attitude when watching live.

The issue of media rights has transformed the nature and process of sport at the elite level. Where once, clubs relied mainly on revenue from ticketing strategy, this has moved to the revenue emanating from the sale of media rights. In essence, this is the way in which sports property owners distribute its sport to ensure that fans have access to live games, events, competitions and also highlights. We note that in some instances, in particular, European football, revenue from this source can generate as much as fifty to sixty per cent of the total revenue stream.

Live streaming is becoming popular and has attracted large numbers of online viewers. It becomes a social commerce venue where streamers can gain commercial benefits from building the relationship with viewers. Before building relationship with more viewers, how to attract more viewers is the essential foundation in the live streaming industry. This article explores and evaluates what strategies and techniques streamers use to attract more viewers through data source triangulation and methodological triangulation. In details, data were collected from streamers’ self-reports, viewers’ self-reports and online actual behavior; interviews, focus groups and online observation were applied, based on the characteristics of data. Through multiple triangulation, we identified three strategies and techniques for attracting viewers: (i) to increase streamer-viewer interactions, (ii) to create synergy with other streamers, and (iii) to conduct self-promotion. Findings were indicated by the popular streamers and verified by both focus groups and online observations. Our paper contributes to understanding streamer-viewer interactions in computer mediated communication. Live streaming platforms also benefit from this study in terms of platform design and marketing.

With the increasing use of mobile devices, users in recent years tend to use their smart mobile phones or tablets to obtain instant information. While staying at home, users may also like to watch live streaming news on TV and utilize their mobile devices as a second screen to interact with the news in order to share feedbacks to friends or obtain more detailed information pertinent to that particular news. The purpose of this study is to investigate the user experience (UX) when users watch live streaming news on TV and use their smart mobile devices as a second screen for various social interaction requirements. It is hoped users will have more opportunities to share their viewpoints and search for more information regarding that particular news to the public, and their voices can easily be heard.