SUBSTACK'S BOLD PLAY: CAPTURING THE LIVE STREAM LIMELIGHT

In the age of streaming, Substack has dipped its toes into the live version of the platform world, which currently dominates livestreaming revenue through TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and YouTube. The move shows that Substack isn’t here to compete with other existing platforms, but to create something entirely new for both creators and consumers. Through the beta release of its integrated video tools, Substack isn’t just stepping its foot into the livestreaming waters – it’s diving into it.

SUBSTACK'S LIVESTREAMING VENTURE: A NEW HORIZON FOR WRITERS

Known for its newsletter service, it’s now adding the capability to broadcast live. It’s not just adding to Substack’s feature set – if writers can go live, either solo or with other writers, it’s a big step toward increasing the variety of ways that writers can interact and communicate with readers on the service.

INNOVATING INTERACTION: HOW SUBSTACK STANDS OUT

A clear counterprogramming element sets it apart. Substack has created a live streaming feature that’s available only to its bestsellers – its creative elite. In other words, Substack is interested in going live with video as part of its premium offering. It’s going live at the very top of the creative stack. Who knows, perhaps Substack will make the feature available to all its users in the future. If it does, it’ll be a player in the world of live video.

SUBSTACK'S LIVESTREAMING: A TOOL FOR REAL-TIME ENGAGEMENT

But for writers, creators and people who just want to communicate with a willing audience in real-time, Substack’s move is a bold step on a remarkable trajectory. Being able to drop a live missive into the feed with just two taps of the finger, the orange ‘+’ within the Substack app, and thus, be a creator and go live at will… well, you don’t have that censoring power over what you say and write anywhere else in the world of scheduled posts and broadcasts that happen hours, if not days, after the events that inspired them.

THE BATTLEGROUND FOR VIEWER ATTENTION: SUBSTACK VS. THE GIANTS

Any competing platform trying to get into livestreams has to take on Twitch’s communities, as well as social media giants such as Instagram and YouTube that have been doing live streaming for years. But Substack’s position explicitly as a home for independent voices, and as a written word-focused community, seems to offer a distinctive angle in this space. In the end, we’ll have to see how many of the site’s writers take to live streaming, and how far they succeed in selling it to an audience.

SUBSTACK'S COMPETITIVE EDGE: BEYOND JUST LIVESTREAMING

It’s not lost on me that Substack’s shift into livestreaming isn’t just another feature to add to its product suite. It’s the most ambitious move it’s made so far, adding live co-creation to its portfolio of tools. The fact that it’s embedding live-streaming inside the writer’s process means that Substack users are exploring unique opportunities to create in live video (either with other people or alone); and it means that Substack is allowing these writers to set the access rules for their live videos – whether it’s broadcast to the world or sent to just paying members or tucked behind a paywall. It’s building a new chapter for Substack in the live-streaming story.

UNDERSTANDING THE MOVE: SUBSTACK'S VISION FOR THE FUTURE

When Substack recently announced that it would be experimenting with live video streaming, it wasn’t just shilling for profit against the incumbents, but a vision for re-tooling the platform to look more and more like a full-service content environment where a writer’s work isn’t merely a static post. Embedding live streaming into the platform is also a way of embracing the shift that content consumption is moving towards: immediacy and interactivity. With live streaming, Substack is offering its creators a new medium they can use to get a monopoly on their own work and monetise their content, and it’s also positioning itself as a platform prepared to meet the content landscape where it’s headed.
Its move is a testimony to its global ambitions and prescience. Its opportunities to bootstrap creators and audiences of every kind, giving them one more old-media monopoly to take back through content creation and consumption, is one that helps fuel a more democratic and equal world. The role that live streaming plays nowadays is too big and important to stay on the sideline, and Substack’s foray might just give the platform a new purpose in the digital content ecosystem that has evolved over the years.