Sharing the Studio: How Creative Livestreaming can Inspire, Educate, and Engage

Many artists livestream their creative process, allowing viewers to learn and be inspired from the decisions -- and mistakes -- they make along the way. This paper presents the first broad look at the range of creative activities people stream. Through content analysis of livestream archives, interviews with 8 streamers, and online surveys with 165 viewers, we study current practices and challenges in creative livestream communities and compare them with prior observations of livestreaming in other domains. We observed four common types of creative livestreams: teaching, making, socializing, and performing. We identify three open questions for the research community around how to better support the goals of creative streamers and viewers: how to support richer audience interactions at scale, how to support all parts of the creative process, and how to support watching livestream archives.