Nagesh Banga currently serves as the Deputy Country Manager at Bigo Live. He is responsible for formulating and implementing the strategic plan, driving growth and innovation, and ensuring that the company continues to lead in the region. The key functional areas that he is involved with are Marketing, Business Development, P&L etc.

Live Streaming - a dream of yesteryears' innovators in the digital field is now considered as an inevitable game-changer in the social media landscape. In 2017, many experts from around the globe acknowledged live streaming as the ultimate future on social media platforms and today 28 percent of internet users from around the globe spend time watching live videos and they are spending 3x of their online surfing time to watch videos. To understand the buzz around the concept of live streaming let look into the history of video and its evolution along with various other factors contributing to the popularity of live streaming.

The Evolution of Video Content
While the rest of the world experienced growth in consumption of video content early in 2006-7 with YouTube's acquisition by Google, launch of video sharing feature on Facebook, and more. In India, video consumption, TV channels' streaming online and other video streaming platforms experienced a boost with the introduction of data plans by Reliance Jio in 2015 at extremely low prices as compared to other data plans. Many attribute the growth in internet usage in India to Reliance and their disruptive data distribution strategy. Today, India accounts for 12 percent of the world's total population using the Internet, and data usage in 2019 has doubled as compared to last year.

Globally, video content is undoubtedly the most popular among internet users and this can be confirmed by the fact that 30 percent of Google search queries were for the word 'video' in 2018.

Rise of a Parallel Video Based Social Communities
With the popularity of video content creation and consumption, many global communities were built to enable users to create videos of their choice and share with their friends and families. BIGO Technology and Byte Dance are the major players in the market, where BIGO Technology has carved a niche for itself and has 69 technical patents & around 414 patents are under the process of application Other platforms like Helo, Hago, Vigo Video etc are also active in their own niche where regional content also is one of the prime markets for the expansion of this genre of entertainment.

Today, live streaming garners higher traffic than any other kind of video content on social media

The newage social media platforms endeavour is to create video-based communities to empower the common man and strengthen virtual global connectivity by encouraging people to use their unique talents and on advanced video creation platforms. The pull has been the use case of AI and the unique set of stickers and effects which makes the user to create something very unique and provide a different flavour from others.

Live Streaming Video and its Future
The popularity of live streaming videos and wide acceptance of it can be attributed to the change in video making and sharing dynamics of this concept. Earlier, tapping into the rising video content consumption various brands and even individuals' created highend videos with editing, special effects and more. This gave power to only selected groups to create videos due to the cost of equipment and manpower involved in the process. However, the concept of live video due to the very nature of it does away with any of the aspects mentioned above. From a live video, people do not expect and do not aim to create a high-end video rather it is viewed as a powerful tool to convey a message in real time without any edits or cuts. Therefore, many live video creating and sharing platforms are gaining popularity. These communities allow users to leverage live videos creatively. For example, businesses can create an account to connect and sell products locally and/or across state/nation boundaries. The live video tool enables the users to share quick updates of the products, its range, price, discounts and more. Any user with internet connectivity and smartphone go live and reach out to his/her audience and tell them about these new features of product. Live streaming empowers the common man to be heard and seen uniquely and therefore it is well accepted among internet users. Live streaming promotes the authenticity of the real-world scenarios which is well received by the general audience.

Today, live streaming garners higher traffic than any other kind of video content on social media. Many influencers across fields are also using live video streaming to connect with the masses and engage them with their unique talents like lip syncing, dance, singing, makeup classes, culinary classes, astro sessions etc. The parallel rise of video content and lower data prices to access that content provided a big boost in video content consumption in India.