Note: the concept is still there as periscope.tv/Facebook live but Meerkat the app is dead
From the day signals where transferable over the wire, people had been envisioning of audio/video and data to be the killer applications. In communications, audio over wire found phones as the killer application and data transfer over the wire found fax/data modems as solutions, but the real killer app the personal video communications application never became a reality.
When internet was born, there was a mad rush to implement the grainy video chat communication applications to the high end multi-screen HD versions…but still something is missing why it has not become mainstream?
But then why is Meerkat a personal video application catching the imagination of video communications.
Though Meerkat brings the personal video platform to the common man, its success is because it is a video broadcast platform (1 direction) like television or ham radio. Its integration with twitter (the text based broadcast platform) proves its broadcast nature to make it killer app for twitter users.
Twitter appears to be a group discussion forum for common man, but in reality, it’s a loud town hall, not a personal coffee table chat place. Unlike facebook, where your voice is heard only to the ears of your friends at the table, Twitter is the town hall where you make your loud voice heard to whoever wishes to hear. The inherent twitter broadcasters are not the common man, they are the people who have taken public town hall appearance as their choice .
Thus the genius of Meerkat is integrating to the public broadcasting platform Twitter.
Twitter broadcasting platform gave all the already active loud speakers of the twitter town hall a new tool for broadcasting visually in a new medium.
So still the search for the killer app for personal video platform is still open. My gut feeling says, common man don’t like to visually communicate every time. Unlike text and voice which common man has embraced, video medium makes them more aware of their looks, appearance etc which society cares a lot.
Thus video communications are best suited for the public figures or the wannabe loud speakers of the society. To conclude, Meerkat is a broadcasting platform inline with twitters vision for building the public loud speakers for the modern day town halls.
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