Streaming, Shopping, and the New Power of Real-Time

Live is the moat. TV and shopping race back to real time. According to the New York Times, broadcast TV is reorienting around urgent viewing, specifically live sports and big specials, because it's the one thing streaming can't timeshift. NBC now devotes Sundays and Tuesdays to live sports. Fox is stepping Fridays with college hoops. Even MTV's VMAs jumped to CBS. CBS's George Cheeks said, quote, broadcast is still the greatest reach vehicle. Netflix's Ted Sarandez says live has a hugely outsized impact, and NBC News Matt Strauss calls it a shared community experience. Nielsen shows September broadcast viewing topped all of cable. Commerce is going live too. It's not just the broadcast world, the Times reports Whatnot right now raised $225 million at an $11.5 billion valuation after surpassing $6 billion earlier. Viewers watched 80, 80 plus minutes daily. Co founder Grant LaFontaine said live and social shopping fills that gap. Emarketer sees slowing growth by 2028, but the momentum is unmistakable. From primetime to storefronts, Live web wins attention and ad dollars. What's the real message here? Media can continue to be sliced, diced in a million different platforms, but if you have unique rights to something live, sports, something exciting, something captivating, you can attract an audience no matter where you are that will always make broadcast and cable and any other platform relevant. They can deliver interesting stuff live. Let's dig a little deeper. So here's the theory. Live equates to scarcity. Live means there's a chance that someone's dress or pants could fall off. You see something before any of your friends do. You're a part of something, so that's a part of live. And certainly with sports, there's the surprise element. It's just not that exciting to watch the super bowl or the World cup if you already know who won. So that's one reason why sporting events are so are so popular for live. But it's not just live. It's, excuse me, it's not just sports. It is live selling online with that platform. Whatnot I talked about, they are selling tchotchkes and who knows what else. Like crazy every day. Amazon, TikTok, they are intensifying their live commerce rivalry. US live shopping nears. It's expected to near 60 billion billion a year by 2028. I mean, that is huge. Let's look at some more facts here. Specifically, we've got a situation where the World cup is going to be on Fox broadcast live, 69 matches. You're going to have more and more live events that make it impossible for people to skip ads. That's a part of the beauty as well. Viewers are watching. This is shocking to me. Viewers are watching 80 plus minutes a day on this platform. What's not? I've never been to what's not. I'm not an expert on it, but they do live selling. Certainly anyone who's followed what's going on in China the last few years know that live selling on China has skyrocketed. There are countless people who have quit their jobs and created in entire careers selling stuff through live feeds on various platforms on China e commerce sites. Now I've dabbled in this a little. I'm a so called Amazon influencer and I've gone live on Amazon and hawked books and interviewed guests. So it's been around, but it is seemingly getting bigger. The other part is just live is really the only way to be truly interactive. Now of course it's true. If you're watching this video right now, but it's a day after I recorded it, you can post a comment or a question and try to get back to you. I might see it, I might not. I apologize. But when you're posting it live and you do have a mechanism for doing that, right now, if you're watching or listening to this show live, I can see your comments and I can respond and call them out. I'm happy to do that. So feel free to do that. People like that. That's why for really important conversations, you typically don't text a marriage proposal or anything else you want to talk to the person, probably in person if it is a marriage proposal. But if it's a really serious business deal, you're asking someone to invest a million dollars in you, it's got to be live. Now it might still be mediated through zoom or some other application, but you're not simply going to email a video clip of you giving a presentation asking for a million dollars. You want that ability even if they don't take you up on it. People want the option, true interaction. You cannot do that without live. And people like seeing mistakes. There's this myth out there that everything has to be perfect like a movie. Well, it is true. People do enjoy going to movies. And if you're director of a movie and all of a sudden big climax of the movie and a loud truck goes by, you're going to and messes up the sound, you're going to redo the take. But if it's a live football game and all of A sudden a streaker runs out on, on the field, you see it and everyone is sort of laughing about it. It's being commented on, it's not airbrushed out. There's a part of that that simply makes life more exciting. Now, I'm often asked by friends, colleagues, professional associates what should be the format of doing their own podcast, their own YouTube show. I do recommend doing it live. Not because you're going to get a giant, giant audience. I get 98% of my audience who either watch, listen or read content from this show on demand later. The beauty of doing it live is for people who do show up and do participate, it creates a much stronger connection. So that's a part of it. The other part of it is it's much more efficient. If you play a football game live and broadcast it, it's over in two hours or three hours. If you make a two hour movie, you can spend a year reshooting, re editing, tweaking. It can go on and on. Same for a documentary. You could spend six months editing a 30 second TikTok ad if you wanted, or a 30 second video clip short form on YouTube if you tell. If you give yourself that freedom. I don't recommend that, but that's why I actually recommend, when you're creating content, do it live. Because if you do make a mistake, guess what? Most people don't care. It makes you human. I make mistakes all the time. I, I've made mistakes already in this broadcast and it's only 18 minutes and 34 seconds into it. I've already made mistakes, nobody cares. That's all right. The other beauty of going live is it can motivate you as the speaker, as the presenter to up your game. It forces you to rehearse a little sometimes, or at least review what you want to say. Think about it. It also gives you more energy if you know, hey, people are watching you. I know right now that across various platforms that there are going to be at least 10,000 people, maybe 30,000 people who at some level are going to see or hear or read something that comes out of my mouth from what I'm saying right now. So knowing that there are tens of thousands of people who eventually will hear or see some part of this, it motivates me, it gives me energy, it gets a little bit of adrenaline, rolling, going and if I thought, okay, I'm just going to record this, see what it looks like and if it not perfect, I'll do it again, I'd be here all day long, I might Lose the energy and my voice. So that's. This is a perfect example of how I think this show is different. We try to talk about big news in the store, in the world. This is a story from the headlines about the rise of not only live broadcast tv, how well it's doing the live of online shopping, but how it relates to you. Because I know if you're like most people who watch this show or listen to this show, you're ambitious, you take your career seriously, you're working hard, you want to understand technology so that you can get ahead. And I do want to give you this tip. Think about doing something live. It could be Facebook Live for 60 seconds or TikTok Live for 30 seconds. It could also just be recording a short form video, telling yourself in your own mind, I'm doing this live and then posting it elsewhere without obsessing over it. The number one problem most people have, professional people, smart people, educated, ambitious people have the reason 95% of them never create content for the world and never speak to a larger audience is they never hit that on button in the first place. They never hit that camera on button the first place. They never hit that go live or that record button. I want to get you over that. I understand it can seem a little scary, it can seem a little intimidating. But if you want to record first, do 3 or 4, hit delete if you don't like them and do a fifth one that you like with to start, that's okay. But long term, I am a huge, huge fan of just go live. It allows you to connect with people. I appreciate so many of you who stop by here on a daily basis and share your thoughts and tell me what you like, don't like, what you agree with. If you think I got my facts wrong, that's great. You can be fact checked in real time, which I appreciate if you're doing it live show live streams of any sort, talking to guests live can't be fact checked in real time if it's recorded. Look, there are plenty of ways of doing it. Mr. Beast doesn't go live very often. He's still wildly successful, but he's in the entertainment realm. If you are a professional trying to talk about what's going on in your industry, your niche, your area of expertise, you're probably not going for 10 billion views the way Mr. Beast is you're probably not going to spend $5 million on a video and I don't want you to. That's the other beauty of live is it's much cheaper. You're not even tempted to spend 10 hours of editing time or hiring editors to spend 20 hours on your time. So it's often much less expensive than the old fashioned movie making way of shoot. Look at it, do it again, do a third take, a fifth take, a 20 take, and edit, edit, edit. So I do want you to think about the opportunities for live creating a video content in your own life. And also understand when you find yourself watching live sports or the video music awards show. Ask yourself why and realize you're like everyone else. People like things that are live, fresh and new.