Meerkat, Periscope and the upcoming social phenomenon of livestreaming

After a brief trial on closed beta, Twitter has launched Periscope, a live streaming service that has been widely compared to Meerkat, the app within the Twitter network that has enjoyed growth of up to 30 percent a day at certain moments.

The Meerkat phenomenon became a trend after a series of users began to use their terminal to launch videos in real time using an app that allow them to not only reproduce them and attract traffic via Twitter, but also to generate a conversation about it through replies to a tweet that the broadcaster could see. Each time somebody you follow begins to broadcast, you receive a notification through an app that says Live now! You can then join the transmission in real time, which then disappears leaving a dead link. Meerkat’s strong growth, an app that looks like it was put together in short order, has allowed the company to attract some 12 million dollars during a recent financing round based on a company valuation of 52 million dollars.

For its part, Twitter bought Periscope for around 100 million dollars on March 4 in response to Meerkat’s impressive growth (and of course that it had witnessed first hand), and is now launching it to compete with Meekat. Periscope is a reasonably mature and polished app, with more than a year’s development prior to its acquisition, and can store videos to be watched on demand, making it an application that can be used at any time, regardless of whether somebody is retransmitting or not.

The pace of change makes it impossible to say whether Meerkat’s impressive growth will continue, or whether many of its users will move over to the more developed Periscope. But what seems certain is that livestreaming is morphing from something that was carried out rarely, into a trend with its own life: you just launch an app, pick up your smartphone, and we become broadcasters of a real time video signal for those who want to see it and comment on it. Unless I am very much mistaken, this looks set to become another sociological phenomenon.

That said, this is a phenomenon still largely limited to the United States, although that could soon change: for the moment Meerkat and Periscope are only available on iOS, reducing their potential reach (the United States is the only country in which the iPhone, which has a market share of more than 40 percent, is resisting the advance of Android, which controls 90 percent of the world market. There are other applications that allow for livestreaming, but for the moment, neither their traction in terms of popularity, nor their quality, nor their interactivity have allowed them to take off.

Nevertheless, experience suggests that these types of apps that gain traction in the iOS world tend to be taken up en mass when they are made available in Android, which could spark important growth in the coming months. Watch this space…

(En español, aquí)