What Makes Live Events Engaging on Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat

Live streaming platforms bring events from all around the world to people’s computing devices. We conducted a mixed methods study including interviews (N = 42) and a survey (N = 223) to understand how people currently experience events using Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat Live Stories. We identified four dimensions that make remote event viewing engaging: immersion, immediacy, interaction, and sociality. We find that both live streams and the more curated event content found on Snapchat are immersive and immediate, yet Snapchat Live Stories enable quickly switching among different views of the event. Live streams, on the other hand, offer real time interaction and sociality in a way that Snapchat Live Stories do not. However, the interaction’s impact depends on comment volume, comment content, and relationship between viewer and broadcaster. We describe how people experience events remotely using these social media, and identify design opportunities around detecting exciting content, leveraging multiple viewpoints, and enabling interactivity to create engaging user experiences for remotely participating in events.