Meerkat is dying | Hacker News Reader

Meerkat is dying

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187 pointsnkurz104 comments

I had a debate with one of TechCrunch's head editors about the journalistic coverage of Meerkat: https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/582547758248136704

Coincidentally TechCrunch published a more analytical approach a few hours later: http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/schrodingers-meerkat/

What really annoys me is that no one took the devil's advocate approach to analyzing Meerkat. "It's a new paradigm in live-streaming," perhaps, but no one has considered that such a paradigm only fits in the narcissistic Silicon Valley culture.

Periscope atleast managed to appeal to non-techies, but even then, it appears to have peaked. In the first week of release.

There's a nonzero probability that everyone was wrong about personal livestreaming in the first place.

One thing I find curious is none of the articles about meerkat (that I've read) have mentioned that Color did the same idea in 2011 [1] as one of it's many pivots. I'm curious as to what's different between the two and why one might succeed where another failed.

[1] http://www.androidstatic.com/color-for-facebook-streams-your...

Qik was doing this ages ago. If I were to be cynical I'd say that this is different because it's backed by a big VC firm, which in turn gives them access to hype. But nothing more.

Qik had Marc Benioff, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz as early investors, before the latter two started their fund as I recall. They didn't have a big VC firm backing them, but they did have notable investors.

Meerkat could still go the way of Color. They're quite early in their public life, from what I can tell, and suddenly facing a much stronger competitor.

And, people forget that Justin.tv worked this space pretty hard before transitioning to video game broadcasting.

As a non-iPhone user that has seen neither meerkat or periscope, what's the new thing here? Justin.tv/twitch and ustream have been doing live streaming for a long time now.

I think there is an interesting conversation to be had about why, in a world with LiveStream, UStream, & YouTube Live Events, people see Meerkat/Periscope as revolutionary. Also apply that question to Spotify vs Rhapsody.

Even more interesting IMO is how Twitch has managed to be so successful (as far as I can tell much more so than any of those) while only serving one market segment - gaming.

Again, I would say good timing. They tapped in on teh fact that people like watching gameplay videos and they built a great system that made it easy for people to use what were becoming affordable video capture frontends to publish live streams.

And its a niche, but it's in a sense, a way more accessible niche than watching a random person lifecast. You're watching someone game. Which isn't that different from watching people play sports on TV.

Because they find a way to rapidly introduce new users into a previously stagnant market. The technology isn't revolutionary but something about their implementation is.

To cite classic example, their were plenty of smartphones before the iPhone but the iPhone was still "revolutionary".

Timing. I was a Rhapsody user in 2003. I even had an AV receiver that supported Rhapsody back in 2005 or so, assuming it was connected to my computer (for stuff like track listing and whatnot on the device). But it didn't take off because timing wasn't right. People were just at a place to start buying digital tunes -- streaming music was awkward.

But beyond that, it took the iPhone (and devices like it -- but really, let's admit it was the iPhone. I loved my Treo, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices too, but it was the damn iPhone) to usher in a device where people could stream on the go. Before that, using Rhapsody (or even Spotify, early on) was kind of a PITA.

Spotify made it easier by letting you sync offline stuff with your iPod or iPhone, but it took widespread 3G and beyond, good data plans and saturation of smartphones for people to be like, "yeah, I can replace my iTunes with streaming music."

The same is, to me, true of streaming video. You could do live streaming close to a decade ago. On your cellphone. Shit, I remember envying people using Qik on the Nokia phones in 2008. But it took a long time, there was massive latency and the quality sucked.

Meerkat and Periscope are fast, easy to use, have restreaming features and are easy to drop-in, drop-out of.

Whether they last or not, I don't know. But just as it took e-sports to make the Justin.tv model work (and I remember when they launched Twitch. All of us, myself included, thought it wouldn't work. But then the devices for livestreaming game videos became so inexpensive and the experience so compelling, Sony and Microsoft built it into consoles. It took the barrier getting super easy and the content being compelling for the user case to be seen).

So again, timing.

Speaking of timing, we can even say the same thing about Twitch.

Video game live broadcasting existed as early as 2005 from Korea, where we would get a 240p stream from OGN (a Korean cable channel), which would sometimes get replicated over users' personal servers. Only the most hardcore Starcraft Broodwar fans stayed up until 3am to watch these games live though.

Pretty much. I was a Rhapsody users, too, and I loved it. It was, like, 90% of magic. But Spotify is 100% of magic. And it's that last 10% of magic that matters. With Rhapsody, there were a lot of things that broke the illusion and made you think about the underlying model of how to download songs, how to get them on your device, how to renew your licenses. Spotify doesn't make you think about anything, it just lets you listen to music, as much as you want to, and a pretty clever facsimile of whatever you want to.

Because the natural progression of software is to take something hard and gradually make it easy.

The same thing happened with publishing text (handwritten HTML to CMS to blog to Twitter). Each step opens the task to a wider audience it was previously inaccessible to.

The concept of a livestream isn't new at all, but there are a thousand subtle things that are slightly different (http://austenallred.com/_site/the-subtle-things/). The way they're tied into Twitter and riding an already-existing social graph, the widespread adoption of mobile, the availability of bandwidth and the acceptance of ephemerality are all completely different than Justin.tv or the many other attempts in this space.

Interesting. Makes me wonder if there's value in shipping multiple pivots of the same concept when keeping multiple paradigms in a single app could be confusing. Sort of like a/b testing at the app store level, or purposefully unbundling yourself.

+1 for the buzzword-density of your post, but I also find that to be an insightful idea -- only problem is that many times one is blind to the alternate 'pivots' that you might was to ship versions of.

Plus, the development of any given 'pivot' is not necessarily trivial, and could be beyond the skills/resources of a company/person to do so.

Perhaps, but only a deep analysis of the metrics will tell if you're shifting the paradigm or just picking low hanging fruit.

Not to mention timing. Even if these were /exactly/ the same product as justin.tv, releasing a few years later into a world with slightly shifted cultural values could make the difference.

It seems you and everyone else seem to forget about the early live streaming app Qik. http://mashable.com/2011/01/06/skype-acquires-qik-rumor/

it was an incredibly popular live streaming app that died after the skype purchase. Sadly we all seem to have short memories. It offered everything you state. Again nothing new is new.

I specifically reference Qik in the blog post I linked to.

apologies - I shouldn't have to click on your blog-spam to get the full breadth of your comment's intentions.

I'm not sure what you expect. According to what you've written, the options are:

1. Write thousands of words of text in an HN comment

2. Be accused of failing to mention one of the dozen livestreaming apps?

your blog post is incredibly verbose and could have easily been summarized as the thousands of other of commenters have done in this thread.

It was

Yeah, why bother trying to understand a viewpoint when you can just immediately disagree with it?

yeah because it makes so much sense to send people to some blog spam rather than making points on a conversational thread.

I would say the new thing about Meerkat/Periscope vs Justin.tv is that Justin.tv seemed to be marketed as kind of a lifestyle (that appealed mostly to assholes[1]), where as Periscope or Meerkat seems like something you can do on a lark, more ephemeral, not something that defines you.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/15/justintv-lifecasters-not-we...

I was convinced something like justin.tv or ustream would be popular, and I was wrong. One of the founders said later: there are only a few things you want to watch live.

And we worked that space for a decade longer still.

Of course there's a nonzero probability. That's an easy conjecture to make about any startup taking on something brand new. You'll always find hundreds of reasons to say no in venture investing.

But what if they're right? What if does become a hit? What if this is a great new communications paradigm? Then the $12M greylock put in or the $100M purchase of periscope is a frickin' bargain.

The nonzero probability was more toward the journalistic implications than the financial implications. TechCrunch had written several articles on how Meerkat would feed a new generation of empathy, which I strongly question.

I had never heard of Meerkat until the press started hyperventilating about the Periscope launch. I can see it being really useful for filming the police or other breaking news/public interest video where quality doesn't matter. But otherwise Vine probably does a better job; a 6-second glimpse into someone else's life is about as much unedited hand-held video as I'd want to see for most purposes.

I had never heard of either one until I saw this post.

Apples and oranges.

Vine is about a curated video with some kind of very short & punchy narrative. Then spreading that as much as possible.

Periscope/Meerkat is about 'teleporting' yourself into something... the fact that you know it's live gives you a sense of curiosity and waiting to see if something fun will happen. Furthermore, you can comment on it and have the person broadcasting see it so thus you can actually affect the video while it's happening. Being part of it is essential to the experience.

What makes Periscope more appealing to non-techies than Meerkat?

Twitter certainly has a large existing user base they can promote Periscope to (I haven't been paying enough attention to know if they have been), whereas Meerkat has mostly been written about in the tech media.

Also, there are plenty of other much more narcissistic cultures...

It is pretty hilarious. Ben Thompson (who I usually like) was all bullish on it and kept using it and it just seemed sad...like old men in tech desperately trying to be "hip" and find the next hip thing and how the rest just "don't understand". Pretty funny.

I want to know how Ben Rubin dare to pretend having more than 1 million users ? now we start to have to some data for both periscope and meerkat (http://lookats.com/stats), i don't understand how you can throw millions on something like this + all this media coverage for a few thousand users ?

Something I wrote recently on this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9207290

"It used to be common to see "paid advertisement" inserts in major magazines. Sometimes going on for a dozen pages. It was clear they were PR pieces: typeset differently and with a different editorial style than the rest of the magazine. Sometime in the mid-2000s they simply seemed to go away and now the magazine just uses the PR pieces as content filler, completely indistinguishable from the rest of the periodical."

Yeah they call it "native advertising" now.

or Advertorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial)

Sort of. While it's not universal, many "native advertising" platforms that integrate with content sites will specify that the content is promoted, sponsored, or something similar. As an example, see nativo.net (disclaimer: I worked there briefly in 2013, and all ads/content served had those qualifiers).

"STREAM OVER." That is all I've ever seen from Meerkat. I think they did a great job in terms of getting the users behind their product, but the user experience is terrible. I've tried to click on about 15 Meerkat streams in the last 2 weeks and I haven't seen one. At least Periscope has a video archive that lets you watch something even after it's over.

Being in SV and reading all the news, I will say that I thought it was bigger than it actually was. On the other hand, I've seen Periscope videos from all over the world. Twitter seems to have created something great, solving the usability issues which were in Meerkat's product.

haha... indeed. "STREAM OVER" is what I see from this app 9/10 times in Meerkat. I got so bugged of the notifications that I logged off from the app 2 days back; before reading this article.

1:n mobile live video is probably simply not a mass market thing. Around 2008 there was whole set of those mobile broadcasting services already: flixwagon[1], qik[2], kyte[3], ustream[4], bambuser just to name some. Also a shout out to the original vine which was 2 times as long 12seconds.tv.

Those headlines linking to mostly dead sites and blogs sound quite familiar:

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flixwagon&dateRange=all

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=qik&dateRange=custom&sort=byPo...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kyte&dateRange=custom&sort=byP...

[4] http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/ustream-launches-mobile-vid...

I think accounts of Meerkat's life and death are both being greatly exaggerated here. It's a contender, it now has a war chest, lets see what the guys can do with it.

And I think it's unfair to suggest they just "cashed in" for the quick buck.

I'm gonna go ahead and guess twitter's "war chest" is a little bigger than Meerkat's.

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that those things aren't really comparable.

Aren't they, when Twitter now owns Meerkat's competitor Periscope?

How different teams use money is not comparable. Meerkat is a small team, 14mm is a huge amount for them. Twitter is a huge company. It is unclear how these things would be used to benchmark one or the other.

In the beginning, VC investment is always potential. Realizing that potential takes time. So, I don't think it makes sense jump to conclusions too soon

I still don't understand how you can raise $14M for a social media app and not have an Android version. "Yes, Mr. VC, it's true that we aren't doing well on the iOS charts, and we purposely excluded 85% of the market from using it despite the proliferation of easy-to-use cross-platform dev tools. But we do have a lot of press and a cool logo....it's a Meerkat! Did Tom give you our wire instructions?".

Yeah Android user here. Always frustrating when it's iOS only when as you said, Android has 85% global market share. The usual rebuttal seems to be "iOS users are more sophisticated or wealthy, we'll release Android later".

>The usual rebuttal seems to be "iOS users are more sophisticated or wealthy

That actually can be a valid argument IF your revenue model is heavily skewed toward IAP or you are charging up front for the app. But for a free social media app whose sole purpose in life is to get as many active users as humanly possible, it's absurd not to have an Android version when it represents most of the market.

Social apps inherently need to be trendy and seem "hip" to catch on with the right crowd. Having limited resources, they chose to go with one platform at launch. I would bet that amongst their target taste-maker crowd (celebrities, YouTube personalities, etc.), iOS has higher market share when compared to the larger general smartphone market.

Because iOS is a huge market all by itself.

It seems that it's not obvious they had a real plan for success. If you are still figuring things out spreading that across platforms will just make you slower.

I have done Android apps for companies who did not have product market fit and it just ends up in having two apps that don't have product market fit.

FTA: "Almost precisely one year later, the same crew of tech “journalists” who proclaimed Secret would be massively influential, declared Meerkat the next huge social media app."

Can these "journalists" be identified? I didn't follow the Meerkat craze when it happened, but if it's the same crew of people, that's pretty damning.

Interesting seeing the activity on Twitter and how quickly Periscope caught up once it was released: https://twitter.com/dacort/status/582570506043310080

Extrapolating by eye, with a biased look, one could describe that as "Total market is growing, Periscope briefly grabbed it, but will be gone within a week"

An eye biased the other way could say that Periscope managed to reach everybody interested in this kind of product, and made them all realize that they aren't really interested at the same time, whereas Meerkat was discovering that at a slower pace, concluding that both products are doomed.

Retention numbers might be able to prove either of these explanations wrong.

Either way, venture capital is aiming for greater gains by taking larger risks. Because of that, even if Meerkat fails, the decision to invest in it still might have been the right one.

Meerkat's Hourly Rankings in the last two weeks

https://sensortower.com/ios/us/life-on-air-inc/app/meerkat-t...

Versus Periscope's

https://sensortower.com/ios/us/twitter-inc/app/periscope/972...

Doesn't the relative flipflop between Meerkat and Periscope have more to do with Twitter cutting Meerkat out of the social graph and Periscope having insider trading knowledge of the Twitter platform? How is this not like Microsoft pushing Internet Explorer?

> The ugly truth that U.S. tech media

The ugly truth that U.S. tech media doesn't make any effort to investigate startup launches, they copy and paste articles that are handed to them :)

^ yup exactly

Tech media makes sports media look like The Partisan Review.

EDIT: Stupid bbcode making me look stupid.

Sports media and weather reports are typically the most fact based things you see in old media. Both are about what happened, and what is going to happen and what opinion is presented is very blatant and well understood.

If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.

>If readers were willing to pay for good journalism, they would receive some.

This is it. Tech journalism is a cesspit of clickbait, hysteria and social justice nonsense because nobody is paying for it and this appeal to the lowest-common-denominator of clicks brings in money.

But then nobody is going to be willing to pay these entities for the content they're using to current bring in revenue.

Don't be so cynical. They also add typos!

What we don't know from the article is Meerkat's engagement stats. If reuse and retention is high, investors may feel they just need to work on an efficient new user funnel to create a healthy growth trajectory. Maybe meerkat was featured by apple and then inevitably lost downloads post-feature. The same thing will happen to periscope which is being featured now. I suspect the platform with the best network effects will reach success faster, and I'd put by money on periscope there because Twitter. But it's premature to say meerkat is dying at this point in time.

Interesting because I only heard of meerkat starting about two weeks ago during SXSW. It seemed like it was everywhere, but not because of headlines, because I kept seeing [LIVE NOW] on all these tweets. Too bad all those links just went nowhere because I was too late.

Funny cause this week I saw Jim Gaffigan post a sernies of meerkat videos onto youtube. I thought, well doesn't that defeat the purpose of a snapchat style broadcast - if someone wants to save it? Clearly I wasn't the only one.

The key differentiator is the subtle switch to 1-with-many (along with advancements in and proliferation of mobile technology + bandwidth). This leads to shared experiences, which are quite different from the 1:n (1-to-n) model.

The eye opening moment for me was jumping into a periscope stream, commenting on various things relating to the stream, and having the presenter comment and take action based on what I'd said ("high-five the Philz barista for an amazing coffee"). Really more of a conversation.

The feeling of controlling the experience partially, in my opinion, completely changes the dynamic. Also - I can enter streams of places I've never been to and join someone on their adventure. With enough syndication, eventually we can all join in on these adventures with people that have similar interests (subreddit style).

Meerkat opened the floodgates. Periscope is the better execution of the idea.

First time I heard of meerkat is when I heard that it was getting beaten by periscope.

Holy hell, the app is two weeks old, there are tens of thousands of tweets about it every day, and it has $20 million dollars in the bank. Is this really what we're calling "dying" now? Because if so, pretty much every other consumer product since the beginning of time is fucked.

I haven't turned off Meerkap notifications on my phone, mostly out of sheer curiosity, and I am seeing literally hundreds of meerkat streams per day of my followers. Apparently you don't have to be at the top of the chart to get hundreds of thousands of downloads (not to mention the app being featured by the app store).

This is such shitty journalism I can't even stand it. Let's have a substantive discussion about a product, but calling it "dead" is bullshit clickbait and even the author must know it.

You're not exactly impartial when it comes to Meerkat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269693

The reason companies take venture capital is to facilitate growth. If the company is trending downward three days after funding, especially in the immediate response to a direct competitor, that's a very bad sign, both for the company, and the venture capital firm.

See relevant image of startup lifecycle: http://www.vccafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/startup-cur...

you can't really call it a trend with just accounting three days worth of data.

I never claimed to be impartial. I use both apps and have been following them closely. I think Periscope will win some portion of the market, and Meerkat another. Saying that it's screwed right now, while there's still so much excited activity, is still bunk.

Almost every app's growth slows after a viral launch. In a few days we'll see Periscope's growth slowing as well. That doesn't mean they all die.

"Slow growth" is not the same as negative growth.

There are more people downloading the app than deleting it. That is still positive growth.

Falling down in the app-store rankings two days after launch is a poor metric to use to determine the future of a company with years of burn still in the bank.

Wasn't the same true of Secret? Some people living in a certain bubble felt a buzz that just wasn't really there anywhere outside said bubble.

I suspect Periscope's meteoric rise has to do more with being prominently featured in the "Best New Apps" section since day one. It was well after Meerkat reached peak-blogger that it appeared in that section, and even so, I don't believe it was in the #1 slot.

Both Meerkat and Periscope were hyped at launch. People jumped on the hype and both apps were then left to themselves to prove they can sustain the hype.

Periscope might actually make it because it does a lot of little things right to attract non-techies. I've shared vodka with a bunch of Russians and just this morning laughed with people in France.

Periscope is not without issues though, and it's hard to use when it takes forever to start a stream and constantly buffers in the middle.

It might be too early to call Meerkat dead, but I do think it lacks enough to carry it past the hype. Only time will tell though :)

Periscope is good but there are too many features lacking at this point. To mention a few:

1) Privacy: What if I wanna share a stream with just my family?

2) Search: I can't search e.g. for 'racing'

3) Management/rules: Was watching a female from Dubai answering questions about life in Dubai. After about 45 seconds, an idiot came in acting as sex offender more than anything else, driving the level of the conversation down in no time. The 'author' should be able to ban accounts.

Other than that periscope is good and works fine.

Re: 1) I believe the lock button allows you to stream to only specified users

Hm, might be. Truth to be told, I tried streaming for a very brief period and didn't notice any lock buttons.

The author can block users (in fact so can other viewers of the stream - presumably that only affects what they can see themselves though)

>There is also no doubt that if Jared Leto and his merry band had realized a week ago that Meerkat would drop out of the top 500 iPhone app chart by Sunday night, they would have slammed their check books shut in a hurry. They were obviously blinded by the tech journalism flimflammery

If the above statement was true, that would mean that this ecosystem doesn't make much sense. Am I naive thinking that founding decisions aren't so emotional, "impulse purchases"?

That depends. Do you believe what is shown on Shark Tank?

I wonder if Meerkat could have held onto its market share better if it had an Android version also?

Periscope doesn't have an Android app, so I doubt it.

That actually makes the argument stronger imo.

I've seen a couple of posts regarding this, but none even remotely explain:

WTF is Meerkat (aside from an Ubuntu release, and an animal)?

I never heard of Meerkat before this article. So the press blitz wasn't that great.

The article title probably promised too much but if Meerkat's downfall did take any “tech journalism” with it, it would be good riddance. I wonder what the consequences of investors not doing their due diligence will be...

Thought of this. (http://tapastic.com/series/101-uses-for-a-dead-meerkat)

Every time I followed a link on twitter to Meerkat, I got the stream is over message. I would be that I'm not the only one and wonder if this might be the difference in the end.

Bigger and faster is the buzz, quicker is the fall.

Meerkat has only one month of service on the store, and already 14M$ in pocket.

Not all is lost for Meerkat if they do FB connect. The Twitter first strategy only works for SV.

As a caveat, Meerkat did make a bone headed move by abusing the twitter api with auto follows. Twitter probably stepped in to far also by cutting their social graph.

Does a FB Connect strategy actually work nowadays? Most startups I've seen try it get complaints like "do I HAVE to use Facebook?"

Most startups I've seen try it get complaints like "do I HAVE to use Facebook?"

On Hacker News, yes. Amongst normal users it's absolutely fine, particularly if you're delivering some kind of social benefit (i.e. actually using the social graph you are given access to)

Meerkat (the Oreilly news reader) died 9 years ago.

I used to use that site... Something about the name Meerkat.

http://archive.oreilly.com/meerkat.csp?&p=1

15 minutes of fame isn't just for people.

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