Everything’s more interesting if it’s happening right now. Jokes seem funnier when you hear them told in person. A dense political debate becomes captivating when watched live on TV. Real-time performances carry a peculiar vividness and urgency you can’t get from something that already happened, even if it was just minutes or even seconds ago.
Dick Costolo should know this well. Twitter’s CEO got his start doing improv comedy in front of a live audience. He’s helped his company achieve its potential as an up-to-the-minute news source. Yet it’s a tiny new startup called Meerkat that’s equipped Twitter with truly real-time way to share.
Meerkat viewers can chime in with comments, Like a stream, and see who else is watching
Meerkat is a live streaming video app that piggybacks on Twitter’s identity, distribution, and communication systems.
At any moment, you can start a broadcast of yourself on Meerkat, which trigger’s a tweet of the link to your stream and a notification to any of your Twitter followers who use it’s app. Anyone can tune in on the web or through Meerkat, and chime in with comments that are sent as Twitter @ replies. When your done, your video disappears unless you save it to your phone.
That’s it. And people love it. Meerkat has become a darling of Product Hunt that’s signing up plenty of tech’s elite and scoring praise from users.
Plenty of startups have swung at social live streaming and missed. Khosla Ventures-based one-to-one video streaming Sup, is in mid-pivot after failing to gain traction. Betaworks’ Upclose launched last month, but the standalone product is a bit clunky. Yahoo bought and squandered a web-based broadcast startup called On The Air. Snapchat offers live one-to-one streaming but I don’t see it used or talked about much.
The consensus is that after plenty others’ failures, Meerkat “just works”, in large part thanks to being built atop Twitter. It mirrors your Twitter graph, so anyone you follow or are followed by there is automatically connected to you on Meerkat. In app you’ll see any of you connections who currently on the air, but otherwise it doesn’t have it’s own feed. Meerkat streams go viral on Twitter instead.
That leaves Meerkat to focus on its value-add: dead simple broadcasting. There’s no complicated set up. No extra plugins people need to install to watch. Meerkat auto-tweets so you don’t even need to do extra promotion. You can schedule a stream for anytime in the next 24 hours, but the real joy is just hitting the button and watching viewers start showing up seconds later.
The only real downside to the reliance on Twitter is that Meerkat links live forever in tweets, even through the streams they lead to may be over and gone in a few minutes. That’s one thing Twitter could improve on if it built or bought something like Meerkat.
Earlier today I downloaded Meerkat, and seconds later I was broadcasting a demo of the Boosted Board electric skateboard as I rode through San Francisco. Comments telling me to keep my eyes on the road poured onto my screen. Later I streamed a rant about how major tech platforms are clamping down on freeloaders, as LinkedIn limits API access and YouTube stopped allowing creators to overlay sponsor logos on their videos.
Both captured what’s special about Meerkat. This wasn’t a recorded video of me skateboarding. It was live. I could crash at any moment. The real-time aspect made it dramatic. And the rant dealt with a heady, obscure topic most people wouldn’t wade through a thousand word article about. But a few dozen tuned into my Meerkat about it because the live, personal aspect made something boring seem kinetic.
This is why Twitter itself should be so interested in Meerkat. It one-ups Twitter on its own mission “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Information only spreads if it has an audience, and nothing’s as compelling as live video.
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