As House Dems protest crosses 24 hours, #NoBillNoBreak streams keep flowing - CNET

Twenty-four hours later, the cameras remain dead but the live streams keep rolling.

Democrat lawmakers on Wednesday planted themselves on the floor of the US House of Representatives starting at 11:25 a.m. ET (8:25 a.m. PT) to force a vote on gun-control legislation. When Republicans exercised their control of the chamber's official cameras and shut them off, Dems tued to social live-streaming apps like Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live to continue broadcasting.

A day later, three Congressmen's social accounts are continuing to stream. Rep. Eric Swalwell from East Bay, Califoia is broadcasting on Periscope, and Reps. Beto O'Rourke from El Paso, Texas and Mark Takano from Riverside, Califoia are streaming on Facebook. And C-SPAN continued to draw live footage from the floor from Rep. O'Rourke's stream.

Live video has surged online in recent years, helping to document and spread social movements like this week's sit-in and the Black Lives Matter campaign. Wider high-speed mobile networks and the improving audio-visual capabilities of mobile devices made the format accessible, and services like Ustream and Livestream provided a simple platform to broadcast. But live-streaming has blasted off as a mainstream tool in the last year after large-scale social networks Twitter and Facebook added ways to broadcast live and promoted the streams to their hundreds of millions of users.