Worth taking seriously rather than dismissing, because plenty of formats have arrived loudly and gone quietly.
The case that it is a fad
It arrived fast and with a lot of noise. Much of the early enthusiasm was about the format rather than about anything being sold. Several markets saw a surge and then a plateau, and a format that needs a person present every time does not scale the way a catalogue does.
All true.
The case that it is not
Auctions are ancient. The live part is not the innovation; the phone is. Selling by competitive bidding in a room has worked for a very long time and the only thing that changed is where the room is.
It solves a specific problem. Objects that are not uniform are genuinely hard to sell from a photograph. That problem does not go away when the novelty does.
It has already lasted in the categories where that problem is sharpest — cards, collectibles, anything graded.
Where it has not worked
Commodities. Nobody needs a person on camera to sell detergent, and the places that tried this quietly stopped.
Anything the buyer already understands completely. If you know the model number, a listing serves you better and we would rather say so.
What that suggests
Not that live selling replaces catalogues — that it occupies the part of the market catalogues are bad at. Condition, rarity, variation, provenance, and the things people buy because somebody explained them.
That is a smaller claim than the early noise made, and a more durable one.
The honest bit
We are building this, so take the analysis with that in mind. The thing that would change our view is not enthusiasm — it is whether sellers are still here in a year, which is a fact and not an argument.