1. INTRODUCTION
In the last few years, a new type of social media hasemerged: social live streaming services (SLSSs). Here,every user has the opportunity to produce and to broadcast his or her program in real time. In contrast
to other social media, social live streaming services are synchronous, which means that all user activities happen at the same time. When the social live streaming service YouNow became more popular during the last year, negativepublicity about the “dangerous” behavior of teenager sappeared on the news. Possible violations of personality rights and especially of privacy were reported. To get a more comprehensive and broader view of the information behavior on live streaming services and
to start a new point for further research, this investigation focuses on the information behavior on YouNow.
It is the first empirical analysis of information behavior concerning general live streaming platforms.
Describing and analyzing SLSSs and their users is a new and exciting research field in information science.
What information production behaviors do users of live streaming platforms exhibit? And what information
reception behaviors can we observe? What are the motives of using social live streaming services? In line
with these questions we have prepared an online survey with YouNow users as participants. For studying
the legal aspects of information production behavior an analysis of potential law infringements on YouNow
streams from Germany and the U.S. by Honka et al. (2015) was added to the study.