How Live Streaming Interactions and Their Visual Stimuli Affect Users’ Sustained Engagement Behaviour—A Comparative Experiment Using Live and Virtual Live Streaming

With the massive expansion in live streaming, enhancing the sustained engagement of users has become a key issue in ensuring its success. This study examines the relationship between real-time interaction, user perceptions, user intention to keep using live streaming, and whether this relationship differs between a live and a virtual live streaming environment. Using partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modelling (SEM), this paper analyses 240 valid questionnaire responses and finds that there is a link between real-time interactions, visual stimuli, and users’ sustained engagement. This shows that users’ active interactions while watching live streaming videos significantly affect their perceptions of social presence and trust, which in turn, affect their sustained engagement behaviour. These effects were found to vary with differences in the live streaming environment. The findings of this paper will play a positive role in understanding the differences between various live streaming environments, in optimizing the design of live streaming content and in improving the perceptions of emotional warmth by live streaming users.