TikTok's Strange Trend of Humans Playing Robots Spurs Hope for US Shopping

tech.hindustantimes.com:

A woman in an ash-blond wavy wig bounces robotically, smiling and slightly out of breath, in front of a green-screened image of a bedroom room lit by pink fluorescent lights. Thousands of people are watching her on their phones via TikTok live when a small cartoon hot dog flashes up on the side of the screen.

“Thank you for the glizzy. Bing bong,” Crystal Alana Bennett says to the fan who had just spent the equivalent of 7 cents to send her a virtual frankfurter, known as a “glizzy” in internet speak, prompting her sing-song acknowledgment of the gift. She goes back to bobbing up and down before shouting, “It's corn!” over and over— enough times to match the corn cobs sent her way in quick succession by another fan.

Bennett is acting like a non-playable character, or NPC, the name for the figures you run into in video games that only have a few, predetermined lines of dialog. That day, about 15,000 people tuned in to watch her stream live on ByteDance Ltd.'s popular video app TikTok – nearly enough to pack the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. In video games, NPCs' limited actions can make them boring. But when a human like Bennett plays that role on a livestream, people on TikTok are transfixed and quick to open their pocketbooks.

While these streams are curious and weird, they're also the biggest live video trend to hit TikTok in the US. Glizzies and corn don't seem like serious business, but every creator like Bennett gets TikTok a little bit closer to realizing what could be a massive opportunity to replicate its multibillion-dollar Asian livestream commerce operation in the coveted US market. TikTok's biggest rivals have been unable to make livestream video widely popular in America, but this latest trend is persuading more