麻豆约拍

Are live broadcasts over the internet the new fast-track to fame? And why are they so big in China?

Manuela Saragosa meets two of this new breed of internet celebrity: Emma McGann is a musician who performs her songs on the YouNow site. Meanwhile over on the Twitch platform, the popular video gamer known as Spamfish is in real life Tim Mines, an unemployed man who discovered that his favourite past-time could actually earn him a decent living.

In China, livestreaming is already a $3 billion business, and still growing fast. We hear from Scott Zhang, founding partner of PurpleSky, which owns one of the country's biggest livestreaming apps, known as Inke. So could it catch on in the West? We ask Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer.

(Picture: Emma McGann; Credit: Emma McGann)