There’s something about live shows that hits different. Broadcasting’s real innovation when the first radios appeared was being able to create the feeling of being surrounded by other people when not physically in the same place.
Before radio came about, “at the same time” meant being in the same room. Events like a concert, sermon, a play, or boxing match were events with a location that you had to go to to enjoy the spectacle.
Audio detached the event from the place, all of a sudden, thousands of separate rooms could enjoy the same moment. This is something that’s rarely thought about but people understand intuitively when they give it consideration.
A Natural Fit
One of the best use cases for decades of live radio was for football commentary. While this wasn’t a superior way to learn the score of a game, as the newspaper the next day would give you a lot more context to what happened.
The appeal was that the score didn’t exist yet and the commentator was describing a world in which the outcome was undetermined. That meant by listening, you were sharing that undetermined world with everyone else who was also listening.
The intimacy of the unedited voice also came to the fore including the pauses, stumbles, and the moment where the presenter loses their thread and recovers. This is evidence that it’s a real person behind the microphone, it’s this imperfect personification what it is to live, rather than listening to carefully manufactured pre recordings.
Liveness Became Scarce For a Time
Live was the default for most of the 20th century, but having something recorded was often seen as being the more convenient option. Each additional step, from the tape to the record the video cassette, DVR, and streaming library, made the pre made versions more convenient, polished and easily accessible.
By the 2010s, most people were able to consume media in their own timeline. They could watch when they wanted, pause, and skip boring parts. While there are obvious advantages to this approach, it also removes something. When you have everything available to you at a given moment, no moment is distinguishable from another. Nothing is at stake between watching now compared to later.
That’s why liveness started to back in vogue with the emergence of platform like Twitch, which was built on the fact that people would rather watch a mediocre game played right now by someone who might mess up than a perfect recording of the same game.
Live shopping channels sell lots of inventory in minutes because the moment expires. Sports is one of the last things that large numbers of people still reliably watch at a fixed hour and is almost the only content that TV executives still treat as being genuinely urgent.
Seeing the Randomness
Online casinos have been around since the 1990s, generating random outcomes of slots and table games. This meant that people no longer had to go to physical casinos, saving them time, energy, and money. In a lot of cases, as they didn’t have any transportation costs.
However, a trend over the past decade has been people sharing of realistic live streamed casino games. It’s worth asking why operators spent massive sums of money building television studios with tables and dealers, moving multiple camera angles and having sub second latency.
The reasons why these tables became so popular is because players wanted to watch the randomness of the roulette spin in real time. There is a difference between a result that is random and a result that you can see becoming random.
The random number generator (RNG) asks for trust, but the physical show doesn’t as you can see the card and the dealer’s hands. Every person playing at the same virtual table will see the outcome at the same time, adding to the sense of suspense for those using a casino online.
The Dealer is Like a DJ
Watch a live dealer stream for a while and you’ll hear the dealer talking, filling silence and greeting players by their usernames as they join. It’s very similar to how a late night radio host for a community broadcast will read out the names of callers and the towns they’re ringing from.
They commentate on good runs of cards wishes people luck and apologizes for when the luck escapes the players, can type into the chat box, interacting with both the dealer and their fellow players.
None of this is required by the game, as blackjack is a defined mathematical system that works just as well away from the live stream however, the dealer provides the human voice addressed to you and is happening in the now. The chat window is like the phone-in line.
The Game Show Element
There’s a whole category of live casino games that bring the idea of casino and game shows to a person’s home. Blackjack, roulette, and baccarat still have their place, but now game shows are a very popular category on these platforms.
You’ll often see an enormous money wheel, a neon looking set, and augmented graphics floating around the real human dealer. Titles like Crazy Time and Monopoly Live run 24/7 out of full blown television studios.
The game show itself was born on the radio, starting with quiz programmes in the 1930s, where the drama was a person under pressure and format cost almost nothing to produce. Television inherited the idea, adding spectacle and turning it into one of the most long lasting entertainment formats.
The live casino aspect is the third generation and it keeps key elements like the catchphrase, long pauses before reveals, bonus rounds that serve like a cliffhanger, and the host who congratulates strangers with what appears to be sincere delight.
No longer does a person have to watch someone else play for money, even though you knew the answer and shouted at the screen. The stake can now be yours, with the gap between the couch and the studio floor smaller than it has ever been before.
With the development of tech in recent years, it’s exciting to see what the future will hold. It’s likely that we’ll see people using VR headsets to play in casinos, where it feels like they’re actually sitting at the table in the flesh. There’s never been a more exciting time to be a fan of casino games.