• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 13, 2016

Whatever Facebook does, the rest of the video business is now sure and quick to follow.

Today, AOL officially inaugurated #Kanvas Live, a mobile-oriented tool that aims to make its mark at concerts and other events and accommodate a bunch of other video toy things, including real time editing, GIF stickers, bubbles and so on. And so on and on, actually.

The #Kanvas Live idea marries the features of Kanvas, which AOL acquired last year, with an an aggressive plan to go live at events where young mobile users are likely to congregate. All of it can be branded--from the GiFs to the concerts and live interviews, living on after the event itself.

It worked with the Guess brand at a concert event at Art Basil in Miami last year, as AOL prepped the bigger #KanvasLive plan.

AOL has been encouraged by beta tests: In those, #KanvasLive got 1.2 million views across all the platforms its touches, and it’s created 251 pieces of cross-platform content including the live streams and GIFS. It also claims that 27 influencers created custom Kanvas content.

Alexander Hughes, head of audience development and social projects at AOL, doesn’t expect #KanvasLive events will truly attract much of a live audience in the big scheme of things. In fact, AOL doesn’t do a ton of promotion for live telecasts.  

But the stuff around those events, in the form of Vines, Snapchat and other social site applications, and including exclusive backstage videos and interviews with musicians, should be a big ticket for viewer. Those live on forever. They call it live, but live isn't where the money is. No surprise there. 

Most of the viewers are young--teenagers, in fact, which isn't much of a surprise either.

Remarkably, Hughes says the #KanvasLive staffing at these events is only a few people with solid knowledge of where to put their content.

When #KanvasLive covered the Shorty Awards a few days ago, it did it with all of two staffers--totally appropriate. The awards show celebrates the kind of short, individualized video content that #KanvasLive is a response to and a marketing tool for.

In a sense, live video is just finding a way to monetize the selfie, or the longer video version of that.

pj@mediapost.com