Showself He Xiaowu: Live Broadcast Promotes the Spread of Traditional Culture

"What do you look like? Can you see that it is a fox?" In the interview room, Victor He, the founder of Showself, pointed to the logo on the cultural shirt and asked the reporter. “The blend of pink and blue represents a cross-border of entertainment culture and technology.” Since the creation of Showself, the shape of the pink-blue fox has blended with the company's philosophy. From the video social platform to the live broadcast platform, since last year, Showself has turned its attention to the spread of traditional culture.

Live traditional culture "just at the time"

The era of live celebrity with high fans base dividends has ended. Under the pressure of industry supervision and homogenization competition, major live broadcast platforms have ushered in a year of content explosion. The platform continues to introduce high-quality hosts to attract and retain more users. The Chinese traditional culture, with its profound connotation and a strong sense of identity, has become more and more popular in various platforms, and its popularity has far exceeded expectations.

In Victor's view, in 2017, the focus of launching the traditional culture live broadcast is “just right”. Since its establishment in 2014, Showself has been involved in the field of culture and cooperated with entertainment companies and TV stations to launch talent shows. As the live broadcast industry has grown in 2017, the time has come to use the live broadcast to spread traditional culture. As a result, the number of users is huge. According to statistics, last year's live broadcast platform had nearly 400 million users, accounting for about half of Internet users. The proportion of young users was high, and live broadcasts allowed more young users to access the excellent traditional culture. Second, in the context of building a network powerhouse and a cultural powerhouse in the country, mobile Internet live broadcasting has become an important window and platform for promoting Chinese culture. On the other hand, traditional culture also provides high-quality content for the live broadcast platform, enhances the cultural literacy of the platform, and makes the platform stand firm in the fierce competition.

With the development of the Internet, the strong network industry foundation and the grassroots nature of network culture provide an opportunity for the spread of traditional culture. The live broadcast of the “National Beauty of the Beauty” series launched by Showself was not only popular with netizens, but also recognized by celebrities who participated in the live broadcast.

National first-class actors, intangible cultural heritage inheritors, experts and scholars have appeared in the live broadcast. In addition to demonstrating skills, they can also communicate with netizens in real-time. Compared to the traditional way of communication, the real-time interaction and fun of webcasting break the traditional form and carrier of traditional culture, and more vitality and appeal, the traditional culture of "far from the people" has once again revived.

The live broadcast platform should "go ahead"

Since the development of the live broadcast, the fashion show and game show can not occupy the whole market. In order to reflect the differentiation, more and more live broadcast platforms have begun to choose a wider range of cultural themes as a breakthrough.

At present, the development model of “live + culture” is mainly “content + channel”, and the platform is only a way of promotion. Victor He believes that in the future development, the platform must “go ahead”, not only to be the disseminator of content, but also to be the producer of content. Not only O2O (Online To Offline), but also OMO (Online Merge Offline), to achieve online and offline cultural linkage.

When enough excellent traditional culture programs appear on the platform, it will attract more users who love traditional culture. It lets the audience to ask questions, reward, turn the audience into hosts, produce more high-quality content, and form a virtuous circle. Those aspects are important to create an ecological circle of traditional cultural society, break the time and geographical restrictions of cultural communication, and turn ordinary netizens into a new force to spread traditional cultural treasures through the platform.

Master in folk

From creating an ordinary stage to attracting famous people to participate in the live broadcast, Victor’s concept has not changed. “We believe that there are many ordinary people who have tremendous traditional skills, such as traditional drama, calligraphy, painting, etc. From this perspective, ordinary people are so talented" He hopes to find more folk artists to participate in the live broadcast, attract users who love traditional culture to gather on the platform, produce content on the platform, affect the new generation of users, and build a positive ecosystem.

The entertainment feature of live streaming made the traditional culture easier to get access and appreciated by people. However, few people can appreciate the core essence of the culture. Victor believes, providing pan-entertainment contents is easier to get user acceptance. But we need to keep in mind that we should try to avoid vulgar contents. We promote traditional culture by showcasing traditional culture in an entertaining way, so it’s easier for younger generations to accept them.

It is necessary to package traditional culture with entertainment elements to better spread among young people. At the same time, the platform will also attract more literary and art workers to enter the live broadcast, provide users with high-quality live content, and guide users to develop on the right path of communication.

"When our content is rich enough to form a system, we will also set up different circles in the platform to open culture, education, public welfare, etc." He Victor said that the live broadcast can not only promote cultural communication further, but also the combination of education, medical care, and public welfare will further diversify the future of live broadcasting.