Wowza even has a kind of a demo app [2] that can do the streaming part of what meerkat does and it's been around for at least a couple years. The streaming part of meerkat is not real interesting or novel but the social part clearly is.
If it's me and I want to get to market really really quickly I would just pay someone who specializes in this to run the streaming infrastructure because it's the least interesting part but actually pretty hard to run at scale yourself.
As an aside, I think they are in trouble because Facebook or Twitter (just acquired a competitor in beta) will get into this space quickly... The tech is not novel at all and the existing social networks have the graph already and can replicate this very easily now that it's showing promise.
[1] http://www.wowza.com/products/streaming-engine