The death of the live chat
This weekend was the British Open, one of four major championships in the world of golf. It’s an event that has been around longer than Coca-Cola, and outside of the United States, is considered the ONE huge event of the year (the winner is announced as “champion golfer of the year” by the Royal and Ancient, the governing body of all golf outside of North America).
During these events, I’ve always done live chats. Either at FanHouse or Yahoo!, we have put together a live chat to give people an option if they are at work or not around a television. Something I learned this week is the live chat is quickly dying, and like newspaper or Blockbusters, won’t be around for very much longer.
The reasons are simple. Sports are becoming more broadcasted on the Internet, and streaming is becoming so popular that even the dumbest of online users can find the event they are trying to find. Just a few weeks ago I was trying to watch Andy Roddick play a round at Wimbledon, but ESPN was tape-delaying the match for people on the west coast (Ed. Note: Nice call, ESPN).
Not two minutes later I was watching a stream on my computer, thanks to the help of Google and Twitter (after finding a crummy feed, I sent out a tweet and got four responses for available links in less than a minute).
If you were given the option to read about an event, or actually have it to watch on your computer, you are going to pick option B every single time. That would be like buying a new house, and putting in a radio instead of a television to watch your sports. You’d much rather see the action than hear or read about it, and that is the problem with live chats.
The next step to this will be live chat interfaces combined with the live feed. During March Madness they’ve tried this, but it doesn’t work great. In the near future, you’ll be able to chat in real time with millions of other viewers watching the action on their computer instead of television, or people just tuning in to the chat because they’d like to have people to chat with.
The live chat was great for a while because it gave people an option, but they have another, better one now. For someone like me, it’s disappointing, because being able to give people updates at real time, and attempting to toss in a few jokes were great, but it just isn’t the same. For every three or four golf questions we’d get in the chat, someone would send us in a question about a link to the action on TV.
That’s where this whole thing is going, and the live chat will be gone before you know it.
