What Meerkat & Periscope Mean for Yoga

The breakout app of SXSW was unquestionably Meerkat — a livestreaming app that is/was highly integrated with twitter. The launch of twitter’s Periscope quickly followed in order to capitalize on Meerkat’s early success and interest. While both of these live-streaming apps have many applications, not the least of which is changing politics as we know it, or creating new and bespoke QVC retail opportunities as Gary V suggests, I would argue it has the biggest upside for yoga. Here’s the who, why, and how:

• Yoga Teachers: So many teachers (myself included) have looked for a cost-effective — and just plain effective — way of streaming classes for students. It used to be you’d have to get a free subscriotion with livestream.com (which forces ads to viewers), or pay a premium, all while still shelling out more for hardware that is hard to travel with. No more. The barrier to entry in livestream is just getting lower and lower — as evidenced by GoPro’s move to streaming from their devices. And even with GoPro, most yoga teacher technophobes will still recoil at the opportunity. Meerkat & Periscope flips that — just use your iPhone, push to twitter, and go. Let students join you your home practice, or your daily meditation. You don’t even have to teach; just practice. This is generosity in action.
• For Yoga Students: You can practice along with your teachers wherever you are — on the beach, at home, in a hotel, and it’s easy discovery — via twitter. I’m not convinced yoga practitioners who currently use online services like YogaGlo would stick around paying for those when they can get better and more intimate access to their favorite teachers, who via their own generosity (or via a sponsor, where the teacher gets paid MORE than what a YogaGlo-like platform offers) share their classes for free.
• For Brands: Brands have two options: pick a teacher or make a teacher. Look for opportunities to be generous and support a yoga teacher who is an early adopter in the digital space and you’ll create a long game worth playing. No more purchasing 30 sec buffers or annoying popups within videos. A teacher worth their salt can weave you into the fabric of the pre- or post-class sections. Such higher ROI there.

I’m looking forward to the first-movers in on-the-fly livestreaming — both on the yoga teacher and the brand sides. Instagram has been tremendous for a lot of teachers, and I suspect those that have found success in sharing videos (like @carsonclaycalhoun) will be the ones to win when it comes to yoga on emerging platforms like Meerkat.

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