Can virtual socializing survive past pandemic?
For its first few years, Teleparty seemed doomed to be a niche product. The browser extension, which lets multiple people sync up their Netflix accounts so they can watch the same thing at the same time, was a hit among couples in longdistance relationships. Otherwise, few people had even heard of it.
And then, in March 2020, the app suddenly found itself with a planet’s worth of potential users.
Lockdowns weren’t so great for movie theaters or the economy as a whole. But for Teleparty, they were “a huge accelerant,” Chief Executive Shaurya Jain said. “We definitely grew a lot.” And they weren’t alone. Call it remote entertainment, a counterpart to the more-familiar remote work. At the end of a long day of video calls and Slack messages, workers unable or unwilling to meet up at the bar can mouse over to another tab for some virtual socialization on apps such as Discord and Clubhouse. Think of it as Zoom: After Hours.
The pandemic gave this burgeoning phenomenon a boost, pushing into the mainstream what had previously been the domain of gamers, overseas soldiers and other sub-communities. These days, everyone’s living life online and at a distance.
Although the future of remote work is largely in the hands of employers, the future of remote entertainment
will come down to what happens once consumers are free to resume the same face-to-face activities they were enjoying two years ago — whenever that happens. (With hospitalizations rising and cities reimplementing mask mandates in response to the Delta variant of the coronavirus, it may not be for a while.)
When Abraham Shafi named his event discovery app IRL — short for “in real life” — he certainly wasn’t anticipating a future where meet-ups would be taking place primarily in cyberspace.
After a pause on featuring non-virtual events during the height of the pandemic, IRL is working on reintroducing them but
also planning for a hybridized future in which there’s less of a line between online and offline entertainment.
“We’ve all learned how to engage online more than ever,” Shafi said, comparing remote entertainment to a muscle that consumers and creators have both strengthened during quarantine.
People have been primed, he said, for a future in which live concerts get livestreamed and digital movie premieres are cultural moments in their own right. (That future is already here for some people; last month, the listening party for Kanye West’s latest album happened simultaneously in both Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium and an Apple Music livestream.)
“Realizing that there’s a whole revenue channel online is massive,” Shafi said, and many entertainment companies wouldn’t have done so for a while (if ever) had the pandemic not forced them to. “You need a drastic global event or personal event to change our habits, for the most part, especially at a scale of a business or consumer habits.”
For many tech companies in the entertainment space, that seems to be exactly what’s happened. Discord — a forum-based platform which offers a mix of text, voice and video chat — was around for a few years before the pandemic hit. But a company spokesperson told The Times via email that COVID-19 accelerated its growth as homebound users “sought ways to stay in touch and spend quality time with their communities,” including not just the video-gaming servers the platform is known for but also book clubs, study groups and sports fan networks.
The result: In 2020, revenue tripled and user growth doubled, the spokesperson said. In March, Microsoft reportedly held discussions about acquiring Discord for more than $10 billion.
“We are incredibly confident in the strength of our
business and our growth trajectory, and are already seeing that people are continuing to turn to Discord to find community and belonging, even as the world reopens,” the spokesperson said.
For the audio-only conversation app Clubhouse, maintaining an upward trajectory as users’ options open up has been a challenge. The platform launched amid widespread stay-at-home orders and proved a sensation despite, or perhaps because of, an invitation-only policy. With the app now open to all as of July and better-established platforms eagerly cloning it, many observers have been underwhelmed by Clubhouse’s recent growth, although international metrics remain strong.
(For startups, whose investors need massive hits to balance out their many misses, slow growth can be as bad as none at all.)
Although its initial popularity seemingly owed much to a captive audience of lonely, bored and sheltered-in-place users, the company’s head of global marketing, Maya Watson, emphasized to The Times that Clubhouse “wasn’t launched to be a pandemic solution.” But, she said, “sometimes there’s the right product at the right time.”
When the pandemic does end, she said, the company will be able to explore new use cases — commutes, for instance — and experiment with hybrid online/offline models.
“For the BET Awards … we sent a creator to the red carpet who was there doing interviews, but then she was live in a Clubhouse room at the same time,” Watson said. Meanwhile, for Teleparty — a social distancing product from created before social distancing was a thing — the pandemic has been a proofof-concept for what wider adoption might look like in the future.