The internet has spent years making sure we never have to wait for entertainment. We can watch a film whenever we want, play almost any song within seconds and reduce a football match to a few minutes of highlights once the result is known.
Despite all that convenience, we still spend an extraordinary amount of time watching people live. Gamers play to huge audiences, musicians perform from their bedrooms and people attract thousands of viewers by cooking dinner or simply sitting in front of a camera talking.
Knowing it's happening right now seems to matter.
Anything Could Happen
Sport provides the obvious explanation. A football match can be terrible for 89 minutes and then suddenly produce the moment everyone talks about the next morning. Watching the highlights is quicker, but knowing the goal is coming rather spoils the surprise.
Livestreaming offers the same uncertainty on a smaller scale. A gamer might do something ridiculous, a musician might forget the words or someone making dinner might burn it. Quite possibly nothing interesting will happen at all, but when you're watching live, you don't know that yet.
Recorded entertainment removes a lot of waiting. Live entertainment makes the waiting part of it.
Watching Isn't Always Passive
Online livestreaming adds something that television couldn't easily provide because the audience can talk back. Viewers ask questions, make jokes and occasionally distract the person they're watching completely.
Adult cam entertainment is an obvious example. Someone watching a performer on Babestation isn't simply choosing a video and pressing play; they can watch and chat with someone who is actually there at the same time.
That makes for a very different experience from recorded adult entertainment. There is more of that available online than anybody could possibly watch, but a recording can't notice you've arrived or respond to something you've said.
The same appeal exists across livestreaming. Having somebody you've been watching read your comment aloud might be a tiny event, but it's something YouTube videos and box sets can't reproduce.
Sometimes Boring Works
Perhaps the stranger part is how little needs to happen. People watch strangers study, eat, walk around cities, open packages and tidy their homes, despite probably having little interest in watching somebody they know do exactly the same thing.
The activity often becomes secondary because people return for the person doing it. It's not so different from having a favorite radio presenter or television host, except now the presenter can see some of the audience too.
Regular viewers start recognizing each other, jokes carry over from previous streams and small communities develop around people who may spend much of their time doing very ordinary things.
We Could Always Watch It Later
On-demand entertainment isn't going anywhere, but neither is live entertainment. Sometimes we want the polished version with the boring parts removed, while at other times we're quite happy to sit through them because something interesting might happen.
A recording can show us what happened once somebody has decided which parts were worth keeping. Watching live means taking our chances.