A scoping literature review on influencing factors in live-streaming spectatorship experience

Live-streaming is a popular phenomenon. It attracts both content creators and spectators, visible in new live-streaming platforms appearing and existing social platforms adding live-streaming features. The relevant body of games and human–computer interaction oriented literature has grown considerably. However, the research is highly diverse and multidisciplinary, and reviews on live-streaming research are missing. In this article, we explore the current research on influencing factors in live-streaming, to identify the state of the field and inform future research. A scoping review was conducted to map the currently researched topics and factors, to find emerging or understudied topics, and to analyze the state of multidisciplinary and multicultural cooperation. Two iterations of a literature search and a citation-based literature mapping were used to collect 348 peer-reviewed entries. Identified and classified themes were analyzed along with visualizations of the local citation network, concept co-occurrence, and an inter-country citation graph. As a result, the main actors, genres, and issues in live-streaming, the frequency with which they are researched, and their trends over time were identified and described. Games and esports dominate research; topics recently gaining interest are e-commerce, mental health, collaboration and teaching using streams, and promoting tourism using streams. The body of literature is well connected; scientific disciplines and research groups seem to be aware of each other. For future research, we recommend exploring non-gaming genres and hybrid events and pursuing interdisciplinary collaboration.