You’ve probably heard the phrase “livestreaming,” but don’t feel bad if you’re not totally familiar with the concept. While livestreaming is now a daily practice in China, it is just beginning to make inroads onto Western screens.

Now, livestreaming at its core is just someone, anyone, filming themselves live and streaming it to an audience online. But what we’re talking about today is the social-commerce livestream, where an influencer talks about a product and answers questions, the aim being of course to sell that product(s).

Not Your Mother’s HSN

Think of it as the internet version of TV-based shopping channels (and in fact, channels such as HSN and QVC are also getting into the livestreaming game).

Livestreaming has seen explosive growth since it first debuted in China in 2016. Here’s what we mean:

• Livestreams on Taobao Live generated a combined $2.85 billion in sales during Singles Day in 2019.
• By the end of this year, China is expected to have 524 million online livestreaming users, meaning that 40% of China’s population and 62% of its Internet users will view livestreams, according to the eBusiness Institute.
• Livestreaming sales in China are forecast to double this year to $125 billion, according to research firm Coresight.
• Huang Wei – one of China’s leading shopping saleswomen better known in livestreaming circles as Viya – sold a rocket launch service (yes, you read that right) earlier this year for $5.6 million. In fact, Viya alone is well on her way to cracking $6 billion worth of product sold over the course of her streaming career.

Add to that the fact that 5G adoption is expanding across China and globally, promising faster speeds that can further fuel livestreaming viewing and sales.

As an example, Alfilo Brands started with a 45-minute livestream from the UK in 2017 featuring licensed British Museum products, and has since expanded to 2-4 hours daily across its portfolio of museum brands that includes Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is also launching an affiliate, Arti Story, aimed at representing museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries outside China, with livestreaming being a key component.

“Since we started, we have not stopped in using livestreaming every day as a marketing tool because now it seems to be every single museum store [in China] has adopted livestreaming and has gone from twice a year to almost daily, which is shocking,” says Alfilo CEO Yizan He.

Westward Bound

In fact, livestreaming has already arrived on Western screens and is on the rise this year in particular as homebound consumers and creators look to connect and shop safely.

• Amazon launched Amazon Live in 2019, giving sellers and influencers tools to promote products and drive sales through live video. It also brought in celebrities like actress Jessica Alba to promote the service.
• Facebook earlier this year introduced livestreaming as an extension of its 4-year-old Marketplace Community. The platform reports that livestreams from creator and business pages doubled in June from the previous year.
• QVC got into the game in 2019 with its Q Anytime app that lets users scroll through hundreds of thousands of video clips drawn from its content library.
• Livestream shopping platform ShopShops debuted this Saturday in the US after finding success in China. Fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff hosted the platform’s inaugural US livestream.

And this is just the beginning. Coresight Research forecasts that e-commerce livestreaming will generate $25 billion in sales in the U.S. by 2023.