  The era of live-broadcast is back but with two major changes. First, unlike
traditional TV broadcasts, content is now streamed over the Internet enabling
it to reach a wider audience. Second, due to various user-generated content
platforms it has become possible for anyone to get involved, streaming their
own content to the world. This emerging trend of going live usually happens via
social platforms, where users perform live social broadcasts predominantly from
their mobile devices, allowing their friends (and the general public) to engage
with the stream in real-time. With the growing popularity of such platforms,
the burden on the current Internet infrastructure is therefore expected to
multiply. With this in mind, we explore one such prominent platform - Facebook
Live. We gather 3TB of data, representing one month of global activity and
explore the characteristics of live social broadcast. From this, we derive
simple yet effective principles which can decrease the network burden. We then
dissect global and hyper-local properties of the video while on-air, by
capturing the geography of the broadcasters or the users who produce the video
and the viewers or the users who interact with it. Finally, we study the social
engagement while the video is live and distinguish the key aspects when the
same video goes on-demand. A common theme throughout the paper is that, despite
its name, many attributes of Facebook Live deviate from both the concepts of
live and broadcast.
