A cyber celebrity (left) live-streams her shopping experience from a mall in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province in June. Such "streaming" or hosts attract tens of thousands of viewers online. (Photo/China Daily)
Streaming smartphone apps package lives of ordinary people as content, capture young eyeballs, spin money
If reality TV is popular and entertainment profitable, how about combining the two to create an insanely real and unfailingly eyeball-grabbing genre? Chinese live video streams on smartphone applications such as the one-year-old Inke are doing just that.
In this realm, anything goes.
Sample: on one of Inke's live streams, a young woman wearing heavy makeup broadcasts herself eating lunch.
On another stream, a live camera captures a middle-aged man fast asleep and snoring away to glory.
Such fare is now the staple of tens of thousands of viewers of popular apps.
Real life of ordinary people, live－that's what the apps offer. And viewers, particularly the country's young generation, find it engrossing and entertaining.
"Rather than spending three hours traveling to a cinema to watch a movie, the post-1990 generation enjoys what we call fragmented entertainment," said Feng Yousheng, chief executive officer of Inke.
On Apple's China app store, in terms of both downloads and revenue, Inke topped the list multiple times in the past few months.
