Live.ly

» see live.ly as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The whole life of this app fits between 2016 and 2018, which for me were ordinary working years at a desk in Ankara. Live.ly was built for American teenagers who wanted to sing at a phone camera and be watched doing it in real time. There is no honest way for me to put myself in that room, and I am not going to try.

It launched at VidCon on 24 july 2016, iOS first, with Android following on 12 september. Musical.ly already had the audience: tens of millions of kids who had learned to lip sync to fifteen second clips and had a following built off it. Live.ly took that following and let them go live, with chat running down the side and viewers buying virtual gifts that converted into money for the broadcaster.

It worked immediately, which is the part that makes the ending worth writing about. By october 2016 the app had gone past Twitter's Periscope on iOS. Around 26 million installs, roughly seven in ten of them American. The top ten accounts pulled 46,000 dollars out of virtual goods in a single fortnight. This was not a failed product being tidied away.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Live streaming in 2016 was a crowded, brutal category. Meerkat had already been shot in the head by Twitter's API. Periscope was the incumbent and Facebook Live was being shoved into everyone's feed whether they wanted it there or not. Everyone in that fight was trying to solve the same problem, which is that live video is only interesting if somebody is already watching you.

Live.ly did not have to solve it. Musical.ly had spent two years accidentally building the exact thing a live app needs, which is a population of teenagers with existing audiences and no fear of the camera. The spinoff inherited that for free. It is a good reminder that the hard part of live streaming was never the streaming.

~ the clause ~

ByteDance agreed to buy Musical.ly on 9 november 2017 for somewhere close to a billion dollars. Buried in that agreement was a term nobody outside the deal saw until TechCrunch got hold of it the following july: if the acquisition completed, Musical.ly was obliged to shut Live.ly down within six months, and to point Live.ly's users at LiveMe for at least thirty days after it closed.

LiveMe was a competing live streaming app that ByteDance had put fifty million dollars into. So the acquirer bought a company, contractually required it to kill its own working product, and directed the survivors into an app it held a stake in. Whatever else that is, it is not a product decision. Live.ly did not lose. It was traded.

~ what it became ~

The standalone app was pulled on 13 june 2018 with almost no warning to the people using it. The official line was that live streaming would be folded back into the main Musical.ly app, which had 60 million monthly users, and it eventually was, in stages, after the thing people had been using stopped opening.

Seven weeks later Musical.ly itself was gone. On 2 august 2018 every account was migrated into TikTok and the older brand was retired. What Live.ly proved, before it was closed for reasons that had nothing to do with it, is that a short video app with a young audience turns into a live gifting business the moment you let it. That is now most of what TikTok makes money from. The feature outlived the app by seven years and counting, under a different name, owned by the company that wrote the clause.

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