LiveGuide was a daily aggregation of live events and fresh podcasts from all over the internet, presented in the style of analog cable TV listings.
Team
Jon Jandoc, lead developer
Margo Dunlap, designer
Stefan Fox, developer
Mainor Claros, developer
Coverage
Poynter: How local newsrooms are using data to help us understand a pandemic
When COVID-19 sent everyone into lockdown in the early months of 2020, the world abruptly shifted from live events to livestreams. We lost the intimacy of concerts and book readings, but we suddenly gained the accessibility and availability of many more cultural events. I quickly prototyped and worked with the Boston Globe‘s leadership team and a small crew at Bad Idea Factory to build an engaging livestream product. It was an effort to restore the communal viewing experience eroded by binge viewing. LiveGuide presented viewers with a scrolling selection of over 100 curated livestreams and virtual events on a daily basis. The Globe featured LiveGuide on BostonGlobe.com in its Sports and Arts sections, newsletters, and primary nav menu, plus Boston.com. We were able to work with the Globe’s editorial teams to surface the newspaper’s original multimedia content as well as their own daily picks across the Arts, Sports, and local events.
Despite the tech-enabled aggregation, curating LiveGuide’s scrolling grid was a huge amount of work. To augment the Globe’s editorial recommendations, I collected, parsed, and cleaned data from hundreds of streams early each morning. In this role as data custodian, I had a front-row seat to witness real-time livestreaming migrate from tech culture into mainstream culture. Livestreaming was one of many trends that the events of 2020 accelerated, and this will have ripple effects in media creation, consumption, and participation for years to come. For that reason, I wanted to reflect on what I saw as I combed through thousands of livestreams this year (if for no other reason than justifying all those mornings).
In The Master Switch, Tim Wu argues that each new communications medium emerges as a fertile new field for amateur creatives, until proving worthwhile enough for the conglomerates to come in and buy things up, professionalize, and ossify the medium. In 2020, streaming entrepreneurs carefully positioned their entertainment products across several recurring tiers of access: financial backers, anonymous viewers, and chatroom regulars. As increasingly professionalized amateurs in a media-driven society, they provided what the professional media, for all its resources and reach, could not or would not offer. They worked to compete with the TV industry itself, leveraging their advantages (free admission to their content chief among them) to battle for viewer attention with entire production companies sporting huge budgets. The entire livestreaming sector is committed to experimenting with a long tail of topics as well as formats, helping these streamers identify new modes of providing compelling airtime that don’t depend on crew headcount or licensing rights.
During the COVID-19 closures, thousands of brands, cultural institutions, and government bodies joined the fray. They sought to rapidly transition their premium in-person gatherings to virtual events, unveiling awkward virtual conferences and re-broadcasts of archival footage. Each day, I would navigate the cable-access aesthetics of Livestream.com, where anyone on the internet can indulge in the mundane voyeurism of witnessing government and board meetings, home workouts, middle school ceremonies, and private funerals and weddings. Infomercials hawk dubious products and participatory marketing schemes.
Elsewhere, the actors responsible for rampant disinformation warfare on social networks did not miss the opportunities livestreaming presented. Primarily far-right personalities rebuilt their pulpits on streaming and podcast platforms, out of reach of censorious networks, but within reach of millions of viewers and listeners. Their daily litany of verbal acid works into the seams of our cultural fabric to dissolve the stitching. And, judging by the top charts, they do quite well for themselves in the process.
YouTube, despite weathering ongoing criticism for failing to shield its users from misinformation, continued to actively promote state-backed livestreams. Ruptly (the hip re-brand of Russia Today) builds its audience through a wide range of innocuous-seeming news coverage. Only the aggregator begins to piece together the common thread: the network always seems to highlight moments of social division in western nations. What seems at first glance like support of a social justice movement is, more cynically, a foreign country regularly training its Alphabet-supported spotlight on the internal strife of its opponents. China’s news agency features the Chinese ambassador defending their Hong Kong security law in the UK. The US’s sprawling Voice of America network offers the only native language livestreams featured by YouTube for several languages.
Amidst it all, against a backdrop of apocalyptic daily news, true crime podcasts surged in popularity. A daily review of the top 100 podcasts finds true crime programs regularly occupying at least 10 of the rankings.
2020 mercifully came to an end, and it’s hard not to reflect on the fact that a year which saw endlessly creative repackaging of amateur entertainment into web streams, as a matter of pure necessity, ended with the empire striking back, as Disney and WarnerMedia announce once-unfathomable amounts of forthcoming professional entertainment content.
We retired LiveGuide as summer arrived and people were able to move around outdoors again. You can still fork its open source code. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to build such a timely creative product with such a deeply talented team.
