Tiny Meerkat live video app taking Twitter by storm
Heard of Meerkat? If not, you probably will soon.
That’s the name, of course, of the super cute mongoose relative that kids love, but it’s also the name of a new app with a tiny following that’s growing like gangbusters. Meerkat the app allows anyone with an iPhone and a Twitter (TWTR) account to start broadcasting live video. And because the Meerkat network rides on top of Twitter’s social network, anyone who follows you on Twitter and also uses Meerkat can get pinged by an iPhone notification to watch your live video.
The app itself comes from a small Israeli company called Life On Air that has been trying to crack the live amateur video space. It was posted in the iPhone app store on Feb. 21 and quickly shot up the charts of a website frequented by early app adopters called Product Hunt, leading to a viral wildfire of increasing usage. There are no fees or advertising yet, so it's hard to tell how long Meerkat will be able to sustain itself.
And Twitter may be readying its own competitor. The social network bought a not-yet-launched live video app called Periscope last month. On Friday afternoon, Periscope started taking sign-ups for a beta test version on its web site. There are also other live video platforms, including UStream, which claims to offer 2 million broadcasts per month, and apps like Twitcasting.
The size of the market opportunity is uncertain. So far on Meerkat, it’s mostly just thousands of people goofing off and trying new things. Jodi Okun, the founder of College Financial Aid Advisors, today broadcast a little snippet of the action in her hotel lobby in Austin as she checked in for the South by Southwest conference. Other attending the conference have been airing some of the presentations live.
Technology blogger Ben Thompson was a little more daring, live shooting himself riding his motor scooter in Taipai traffic. Yahoo New political reporter Jon Ward interviewed Senator John Thune. Even Twitter CFO Anthony Noto got into the act yesterday, although his video was so brief, he may have accidentally pushed the video streaming button in the app as he was first exploring how to work the app.
And that’s one thing about Meerkat – the videos are live and only viewable while they’re being broadcast. Once the broadcast ends, the video disappears, like photos on Snapchat. There's certainly growing interest in short video, from giants like Facebook (FB) and Google's (GOOGL) YouTube as well as dozens of small startups. But it's much too soon to tell who, if anyone, will dominate the future market.
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One early use for Meerkat seems to be holding press-conference style Q&A sessions. Vincenzo Landino, a social media strategist in New York and one the most viewed Meerkat video makers, holds lengthy sessions where he takes questions from viewers about how best to use Meerkat and other social media services.
Viewers’ questions appear both in the app and on their Twitter feed at the same time. Meerkat’s developers say they integrated the Twitter feed posts because it tended to keep the questions more civil.
So far, there aren’t a lot of higher profile Twitter users broadcasting Meerkat video, but it’s easy to imagine how popular sessions with celebrities could be. Who knows if Meerkat’s network could even handle the traffic if someone like Katy Perry or Barack Obama went live.
Meerkat is vulnerable to a countermove by Twitter of course. The giant social network could cut or limit Meerkat’s use of Twitter users or introduce its own copycat feature. Things could get very sticky if Periscope takes off.
So there may be me a lot more live videos in the future of social media. They may or may not be arriving via Meerkat.
