August 15, 2016

Blab’s Demise Highlights Livestream Video Challenges

The difficulty in creating great live content is causing Periscope and FB Live a lot of pain, says Blab creator.

Live video streaming app, Blab, has been shut down after its developers said creating enough “awesome” live content was just too difficult.

Monkey Inferno, the company behind the revival of Bebo, launched Blab in April 2015 and it gained 3.9 million users in less than a year.

The average daily user spent more than 65 minutes per day on the app  but, despite its apparent popularity and success, Monkey Inferno CEO Shaan Puri revealed the Blab was having trouble getting first-time users to return.

Puri says that the user stats would be considered “great for any one-year-old startup. Yet it didn’t work out. Of the 3.9 million total users, only 10 per cent (400,000) came back on a regular basis.”

Puri believes this is because the majority of live streams are not interesting enough to justify people stopping what they are doing to watch the broadcasts.

He says: “The struggle with live streaming is that we need to show you something awesome, that’s being made right now.

“Turns out, that’s really tough. It killed Meerkat, and Periscope and FB Live are feeling the pain right now. Really, only Twitch has gotten it right with live streaming video games. In live streaming, the churn is real.”

Puri revealed that he had hoped video replays would help, but less than 10 per cent of all watch time was on replays.

This, he says, is because “the off-the-cuff, unpredictable nature of livestreams make for terrible replays. The better the live stream was, the worse the replay will be.”

Puri also notes that an increasingly divided user group also added to the app’s woes.

He explains: “For the past six months, there has been a growing divide between two groups of users – people who use Blab as a way to broadcast to an audience and people who use Blab as a place to go to hangout with friends.”

“It was exciting to see big names like ESPN, The UFC, Tony Robbins, Cisco, Adobe, IBM, SAP, Product Hunt use Blab to interact with their audience.

“But the majority of usage came from everyday people just hanging out. They weren’t making content, they were making friends.”

The best ‘content creators’ used it once a week, for two hours, according to Puri. The people who were hanging out with friends used it five–six hours per day, every day.

“It was a place to unwind after school or work,” he says. “Without any scheduling or planning – you could find your friends hanging out on Blab. The lounge was ‘always on’, and the conversation would rage through the night until the sun comes out the next morning.”

His team is still focused on building a product that millions of people will use everyday.

He adds: “Blab was great in many ways, but it wasn’t going to be an everyday thing for millions. So we’re kicking down the sandcastle, and re-building it as an ‘always on’ place to hang with friends.”