Motives for Using Facebook Live Streaming Service and Resulting Gratifications - A Survey of Viewers and Streamers

With an estimated 33 million users, Egypt is the largest Arab country using Facebook while Saudi Arabia comes second with 18 million users (Alhamad, 2017) In fact, this may emphasize the importance of studying the nature of the use of social media networks in general and Facebook in particular in Egypt.
Less than a year after the launch of that service on Facebook, added to the timeline for all users in November 2016, there was a need to determine the nature of the use of that service that enabled users to own a low-cost media production technology, and also allowed them to use live broadcast cross their smartphones only by pressing the Go Live button. Seemingly, this is a qualitative development at the level of form and nature of use, which in turn requires researchers to take a different pathway of scientific theorizing to deal with the features of the new media scene with more coherent and complex interpretations in the light of the growing interest in social media sites in general and Facebook in particular.
Therefore, the current study monitors and characterizes the motives of the Egyptian users of LSS on Facebook. It also examines the gratifications resulted from the use of both the streamers and the viewers who interact with this service in different levels, and also monitors and characterizes users ' trends towards Live Stream on Facebook as a new interactive service.