The success of Periscope and
Meerkat shows livestreaming offers something beyond the practical
intent of the technology. Beyond demos and instructional presentations,
livestreaming apps provide direct access to a streamer’s personal
experiences. A trip to the grocery store or a walk to work becomes a
ride-along, a participatory event. As mundane as these tiny moments
seem, they can be fascinating once streamed because the presentation is
hyper-realistic, unfiltered and intimate. These snippets of life are
more engaging than the carefully curated images posted to Instagram and
Facebook.
Now comes Unicorns,
an app that streams whatever you’re doing on your phone—playing a game,
texting, swiping through Tinder. It’s like a combination of Periscope
or Meerkat and Homescreen,
the app that takes a shot of your homescreen and serves as a discovery
platform for others, a peek into what apps people are using and what
essentials get the coveted dock spot.
“Your homescreen is personal, which makes it more exciting!” says
Mai-Li Hammargren of Lookback, the company that created Unicorns (and
doesn’t believe in job titles. No seriously. It doesn’t). “A personality
test I read the other day asked questions such as, ‘What is the last
thing you touch at night—your partner, or your mobile phone,’
discovering that most people act like they are in love with their
phone.”
Even if you’re not in love with your phone, you’re probably
territorial about it. Think about any time you’ve handed it over to show
someone a photo or a Facebook post—the moment they scroll past what you
intended them to see, genuine panic sets in. What happens within our
phones almost feels like what happens within our heads. Why on earth
would you want to broadcast such private moments?
Aside from narcissism, of course.
The biggest reason is practicality. The app is being used to help
developers demo their software and replicate bugs and glitches. Gamers
can use it for playthroughs, to show how to get past a tough level.
“We’re seeing a lot of users gaming, of course, and we’re super excited
about this, but also seeing many users coming on to showcase pre-release
apps or upcoming features and chat with the users live … it has so many
possibilities,” says Neil Kinnish, another member of the Lookback team.
In fact, Lookback originally developed the tech as a developer tool for
user testing. But now, it’s become something more.
We’ve learned time and time again that the Internet loves watching people Internet—the success of WatchPeopleCode is
yet more evidence of this. And the rise of these livestreaming apps is
something that only could have occurred with recent improvements in
network throughput and camera quality. “We’ve hit that point where live
video and access to faster connection speeds is becoming better and
better,” says Lookback’s Kinnish.
Using Unicorns is simple. You download it to your Mac desktop, then
connect your iOS device to your computer. Start the app when you’re
ready to stream. None of what you capture is public until you’re ready—a
quick tweet invites people to tune in, otherwise the stream is for your
eyes only. You can also tweet a link after streaming and let viewers
replay the session.
Once you start the stream, everything that happens on your phone becomes a part of the show. While watching a stream of me playing Dots
(don’t judge) might also feature a Twitter DM notification popping up. A
demo of a new app might be stage-crashed by a personal iMessage.
Clicking through and viewing some of the streams, you glimpse some
intimate digital moments that users may not have intended to share. Not
to mention plugging in your passcode–sure, you don’t give the whole
thing away, but it’s still not something you’d list under best online
practices.
Expected overshares are a casualty of Unicorns. Owen Williams, who writes for The Next Web and has been playing around in Unicorns, says he accidentally showed viewers his PIN. Even with these privacy slip-ups, Williams thinks Unicorns could catch on.
“Think about what Twitch did for games that nobody seemingly thought
others would watch,” he says. “There are millions streaming every
month.”
So yes, there are probably hundreds of people who want to watch a livestream of you picking an Instagram filter.
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