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Comment by bentcorner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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

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.

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.

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".

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.

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...

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