Meerkat is remarkable. If you haven’t come across the live-streaming app, you will very soon. The app is growing exponentially, as measured by number of live streams (all helpfully advertised on Twitter). Meerkat revolutionises the economics of production for content production. (Internet FTW.)
Meerkat joins a small list of products which really make my jaw drop during the 24 years I’ve been on the Internet. That lists includes things that made it (like Usenet, IRC, AltaVista, akebono.stanford.edu) to things that didn’t (Ubique) and things that are still with us today (Skype, Twitter, Quora, web search).
Like many a winning product, Meerkat has got it’s timing right. The technology may not be revolutionary (didn’t Qik do this?) but the user experience plus market readiness is like Caesium and water.
This is what I wrote this a few days ago on my LinkedIn blog (lightly edited for clarity)
Smartphones are powerful enough to launch video streams in an instant.You can start a Meerkat stream within 3 seconds of clicking the app button. Yup — that’s not a typo. From nothing to broadcast in 3 seconds. 3 seconds. Nothing else has come close to letting me livestream as simply as checking my email.
Users love watching video on their phones. 50% of all YouTube views are on mobile devices.
Networks can cope. Video-friendly 3G and 4G services are being rolled out wider than ever before.
Twitter social graph gives it a leg-up. At least for now, the app is smartly riding on Twitter’s network. With Meerkat, I already have an audience I can reach — and an audience which may even be interested in what I have to say.
Twitter, Snapchat and others have made us comfortable being publishers, informal content creators and more comfortable with ephemeral content.
Twitter has established the notion of the influencer or topic authority. My startup, PeerIndex, (now owned by Brandwatch, my employer) specialised on tracking and identifying subject sector influencers. These are people who have views and opinions that are of no interest to most of us, but loads of interest to a few of us.
Meerkat is an app which corals a bunch of different technologies, products and consumer behaviours to essentially reduce the cost of live video production and distribution to zero.
Producer economics
As a potential producer, this hugely increases the market for producers of content. We don’t need solely economic reasons to produce content because there are zero economic costs for producing that content. In other words, we don’t need to monitise it by advertising, pay-to-view fees, like camgirls do, or being part of well-resourced mainstream media, or being a large enough celebrity draw. (Of course, there are tons of paths to monetisation for content producers and Meerkat alike none of which are relevant to today’s discussion.)
We can be driven by other reasons — passion to share something we care about; desire to show off and grand stand; sheer enthusiasm for something that is new; need for a wider intimacy; to stave off loneliness; to share a moment (a protest, a car crash, or a man on a unicycle) and a hundred other rationales.
We’ve seen this picture before. The Web is this picture. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat are this picture. They all demonstrate what happens when you reduce the costs of content production. More people produce. Institutional filters melt away. Content becomes more raw. Stories are told faster. Reality overtakes polish.
But Meerkat is the cheapest & easiest of the lot.
You don’t have to think. You don’t have to write. You don’t have to curate. You don’t have to plan.
Just press and go.
Content production on Meerkat makes using Instagram filters feel like cumbersome hotmetal typesetting, let alone using Twitter to craft exactly 140 characters of insight. Content production ultimately democratised.
(As an aside, you don’t have to do any of the above but it might by kinder on your audience if you undertake a modicum of planning. And as a second aside, Meerkat will certainly favour those who can extemporise.)
The ultimate limitation for video content production will be thecontent producer’s time (and ultimately the shame or shamelessness about broadcasting when they have nothing to say).
Just press and go.
