
Live Video On Tumblr shows promise as a video streaming feature.
Video streaming has gained another social channel, in Tumblr. The microblogging social media service announced that starting June 21st, video streaming will become an available feature to all Tumblr users.
Video streaming is quickly proving to be the direction in which social media will be going. There are concerns, however, in regards to how quickly social media is adopting video streaming. Personal user streaming from a handheld or portable device is currently still difficult and result in poor quality content. Mobile data plans do not currently guarantee enough speed and stability to allow users to stream video for several hours.
If video streaming does, in fact, become one of the principal means of gaining popularity online, future generations of social media users could become considerably less outgoing. A lot of contemporary social media revolves around events.
Many believed that May 2013 would be the beginning of the end for Tumblr. The media service was acquired by Yahoo! from its founder, David Karp. The transaction left David Karp $1 billion richer.
Currently, Tumblr sees close to 600 million monthly visitors worldwide. Over 300 million new blogs are added to the site every month as well.
The streaming feature, currently known as “Live Video on Tumblr,” could prove to be a worthy competitor to other video streaming services such as Google’s YouTube, Amazon’s Twitch, Twitter’s Periscope, or Facebook’s Live.
Competition aside, however, many speculate that the video streaming feature is meant to help Tumblr become a more financially valuable tool for Yahoo! as it has so far not been able to meet the yearly $100 million sales target set by its latest owner.
Following the acquisition, Yahoo! publically promised Tumblr users that it would not alter the microblogging platforms means of function. While Tumblr’s yearly sales target was also announced publicly as well, Yahoo! kept its word and did not flood the social media service with its pre-designed marketing concept.
Tumblr has currently not released any additional information apart from what is already present on the website. As such, it is yet unknown if and how Yahoo! will use Live Video on Tumblr to increase the latter’s revenue.
The first day of Tumblr’s video streaming feature proves to be an entertaining one, nevertheless. A Harlem Globetrotter will be giving basketball lessons and artist Adam J. Kurtz will be having a Q&A session later on.
Image Courtesy of Live Video on Tumblr.