Cartoonist Hu Xiaopei, known as RC, does live broadcasts while she draws. The three pictures were finished during her show. [Photo/China Daily]

Hu says that sometimes she has few viewers because the show can be three hours long. "But even if there are just a handful of people watching, it helps me."

Similarly, you can easily find a tour guide broadcasting his or her tours, a barbeque owner cooking kebabs or a tattooist going about his or her work for all the world to see. Everything, it seems, is fit for broadcast.

Han Haoyue, a cultural critic, subscribes to the view that mass broadcasting is driven, apart from technology, by people's boredom, something he calls the "boringness culture".

"The entire internet business is based on people's boredom. Watching a nobody doing something routine produces no value. It doesn't even satisfy people's desire to peep.

"People with business to do may have a biological repulsion when watching these things. However, it is indeed an easy way to fill fragmented time. The threshold is very low. It does not even have to cost a cent."

It will be entertainment stars, rather than the grassroots, who change the business, Han says.

"The arrival en masse of the celebrities on live broadcast will compress grassroots' space. People want to watch stars. Before, there were no stars on these platforms, so there was no choice but to watch ordinary people. Everything will change."