I really like Periscope. It's clean, fun, and there is a lot of potential, especially with their Twitter distribution. Tried it out this morning and it was really smooth.
Meerkat is great too, but clearly has an uphill battle for the next few months after the initial hype. They certainly have passionate initial fans though.
I'd be curious to see with Facebook's dedication to video, especially highlighted at F8, if they would consider swooping up Meerkat right now and offer distribution through their ecosystems. This might just be me, but I have Twitter streaming all day, while I check Facebook maybe 2-3 times sporadically, so it might be a bit tougher to capture attention. But who knows, it will be really fascinating to watch.
I'm assuming Grelock, their recent series B lead, would not be interested in selling so soon after their investment for anything less than 2x. Post-valuation was $52M, probably a few buyers out there at that price but who knows(Full details on their Series B: http://i.imgur.com/9zOonad.png)
>Meerkat is great too, but clearly has an uphill battle for the next few months after the initial hype.
I wonder about nuances of engagement on Periscope vs. Meerkat.
Periscope's saved video is touted as a feature, but I've noticed that because Meerkat does not give me this option, when I get a notification for a stream I want to watch, I hustle to engage because it's live and I don't want to miss it.
I have not used Periscope yet and will be checking it out, but I can absolutely envision a scenario where I get a Pscope notification and ignore it because there really is no urgency as it will be there later. And then those streams end up like just another article in my "read-it-later" apps. Saved and then forgotten because I've moved on, and the promise of what could be in that stream just isn't compelling enough to chase it down later. Saved video is what we already have everywhere all of the time.
My guess is that Meerkat's inability to save the stream could be the killer feature.
While I can see why Meerkat providing the option not to save as a feature it is also its greatest frustration. My success rate of actually viewing a Meerkat stream before it gets taken offline is maybe 20%.
As I saw on Twitter the other day, Meerkat is great at letting you know you are too late to view a Meerkat stream.
I think there's a happy medium. My experience has been the opposite: I have never managed to show up on time for a Meerkat so the experience was worse than horrendous. I understand what you're saying about the artificial ephemorality being important to the dynamics, tho. I'd try to find some happy medium where speed is encouraged but content is still available for a short period for us mere mortals.
That's not a feature, that's a limitation that forces you to change your behaviour. It's forcing user engagement. And when I see a Meerkat feed I missed I'm just annoyed (especially as I expect it to be live when I tap the tweet) - I'm much happier being able to see a replay on periscope.
I wonder if Greylock had heard anything about the Twitter/Periscope deal before investing in Meerkat.
For a VC firm that is as well-connected as Greylock, you would think they would have known something or at least aware of Periscope's existence and objectively superior platform.
Nothing indicates to me that they did, which seems like incredibly poor due diligence on their part if true.
It would seem pretty unlikely for Josh Elman, an early employee at Twitter, to not have caught wind of the deal, but who knows.
I'm guessing they still saw (and see) potential for Meerkat, as one day of buzz for Periscope does not a successful product make. Plenty of ways to compete still, it just got a bit harder.
People keep making comparisons to other social networks, but in this case the two products are way too similar to coexist. Influencers will decide what platform they like best. You can't exactly do a simultaneous broadcast on both apps at the same time.
Just seems like if you were in the loop it would have been an unnecessary risk to invest now without waiting to see how the market responded to a Goliath competitive offer.
Yeah, this is going to be big. I wasn't convinced, but after actually tuning into a couple of broadcasts, Periscope's potential became immediately apparent.
> This might just be me, but I have Twitter streaming all day
Good lord, how do you get any work done? I have Twitter and FB relegated to my phone only, and I try to check HN ~twice a day maximum. The internet is too large and too interesting, if I'm not careful I'll just get sucked under.
I don't like the message Twitter sends with the semi-walled garden. Maybe I'm completely wrong here, but this to me says "develop on our platform and if you come up with a good idea and we like what you do we'll just do it ourselves"
Not saying that's never true, but in this specific case there's just no way Twitter went from zero to release with this app since meerkat launched. A company the size of Twitter doesn't do weekend hackathons for important launches like this. Not that I know of, at least.
Add to that the obviousness of this app, and bayesian chances are pretty high they just came up with it concurrently but were later with the release.
EDIT: It also explains why Twitter went so draconian on Meerkat.
EDIT2: But I'd have to add: yeah, Twitter's behavior is chilling. The way they cracked down on Meerkat, and now just try to play this launch off as if nothing happened, it's disingenuous. Just come out and say it, Twitter: you used your technically justified power over Meerkat to gain competitive advantage.
EDIT3: A friend tells me they didn't develop this app, they just bought it. Makes even more sense.
> Not saying that's never true, but in this specific case there's just no way Twitter went from zero to release with this app since meerkat launched. A company the size of Twitter doesn't do weekend hackathons for important launches like this. Not that I know of, at least.
Periscope had been in a closed beta for months before they were purchased. I'm surprised no media has ever tried the angle of Meerkat being a Periscope clone.
I'm pretty naive when it comes to these things but my sense was that Meerkat's use of Twitter was pretty asinine and that was the main reason for the banishment. Does Twitter have much of a history of banning services merely for competing?
Always has been the message, right from Microsoft to Apple to Twitter. I expect Uber will do the same - they're just in the "let's open up our API to make the world a better place la la " phase now. As soon as someone builds a breakout app on their API, they'll eat it.
I think Twitter bought Periscope (In January Sometime) before Meerkat launched (Early March), but Twitter didn't disclose the acquisition until after Meerkat launched (Mid March).
I'm happy for them. Don't get me wrong, I love meerkat, it's a great app. Periscope looks like a one night hack for me. My point is that their entire app relies entirely on Twitter.
Like there's this great sunset, and you can't enjoy it because you're busy tweeting it. And there are a handful of others who can't see the sunset because their looking down at their phones, receiving the tweet.
This is a pretty useless and unnecessary attack. Sunsets make up a very large percentage of Instagram, Snapchat, and FB photos shared at my university, which shows apparent social value.
Sure you may appreciate the experience of watching a sunset live, but clearly the social sharing aspect may be more important to others.
What? I never said sunsets weren't beautiful. That's why people share them. I don't think of them as just a social bridge as the previous poster, but I was merely stating that sharing them can be the biggest value seen by others.
My original remark was a bit tongue in cheek - here we really can define every life experience in terms of engagement metrics.
Aside from sharing, we like to photograph things as some sort of time-space marker for ourselves, even if we never do anything with it. "This is memorable, so I should take a photo to affirm that." That's why everyone takes a goddamn photo of the Eiffel Tower.
No, the branch of the discussion is regarding sunsets in the context of social media/apps. Outside of that, they can be any number of things to a variety of people.
I was thinking about this after browsing through some old travel photos recently. Apparently when there is something that is memorable like a sunset, I'll take many photos of it over the span of time it is happening.
Did it change colors? 10 new photos. Brighter and more vibrant? Still more photos.
It becomes tiresome to choose which sunset photo is the best once I return, so I have begun trying to improve my photography skills so I can feel confident I've captured the moment in a shot or two.
And if I don't that is still okay because even a mediocre picture is able to conjure up the memories and feelings of the moment as I browse the photos years later.
I've seen photographer advice that said something like "take 100 photos and only show 5" so maybe the trick is to keep taking tons of photos and learn how to select the best of them.
Yeah, I've heard that too though I don't remember if that applies to taking 100 photos throughout the course of a day and show the top 5, or taking 100 photos of a single event and show the top 5.
If it is the latter, then it seems like I would miss out on experiencing the event.
Sometimes capturing the event is experiencing the event. I've seen many amazing sunsets. Some I've just enjoyed as is, some I've enjoyed the experience of trying to capture what I was seeing.
I'm more likely to remember the ones I've captured (at least to some degree) than the ones I haven't.
Not all sunsets and sunrises are equal...plus you can't easily witness sunsets at every corner of the world on your feet, yet you can on the internet. That's really powerful.
It's weird how these app fads go. I used to work for a company in Charleston, SC that has been doing live streaming for almost a year now (http://stre.am/). They got some press out of SXSW, but without a voice in the Si Valley echo chamber, I suspect they're going to get crowded out.
Remember that Twitch.tv started out with a guy carrying a camera on his head and lifestreaming everything.
Running a successful company depends on knowing which way the wind is blowing and adapt accordingly.
The adoption of justin.tv for e-sport was a huge surprise, but Justin.tv were smart enough to catch on to the trend and adapt.
That's also why the "ahead of their time" trope can be very misleading.
--
Meerkat treated users incredibly disrespectfully, and I can't be bothered that a company might fold at the first sign of competition. It's not like Jaiku and Pownce weren't around at one point.
I think live video streaming for mobile is going to be far more than a fad. I believe we're very close to a tipping point, where all will take is a single high profile case (imagine someone live streaming an instance of police brutality for example) for the technology to reach a mass audience.
I think its pretty big everywhere else in the world. People in South Korea use it for "muk-bang"(watching pretty girls eat a TON of food) and Chinese use it for gaming(most gaming channels with 10k+ viewers are chinese channels). I assume Europe has a lot of gamers live stream channels, but the number must be dwarfed by Chinese.
It's really interesting to see cultures evolving around this technology despite America's lag on adopting it.
imagine someone live streaming an instance of police brutality for example)
What's the case for the "live" part, though? If you imagined everyone at a Ferguson protest live streaming their experience it would be utterly overwhelming. Much better instead for people to edit the sections that are actually interesting and post them to YouTube/LiveLeak/whatever. I don't see how livestreaming adds much.
The generalization of this point is "what's the case for live anything" which can be answered simply with "presence" or more broadly, shared experience.
Sport is only the most obvious example. Why doesn't everyone just record and watch the game at their leisure? Or just get the highlights? Sure, those are options, but the enduring appeal of live sport points to there being more to it than just consumption of information.
But the generalization of the point removes the point I was referring to. I'm not going to argue that live sports are popular for a reason, just that live watching a large number of people attending protests is less so.
I suspect the original commenter was just using a topical example, but ok, let's say it's protests.
A very large number of people streaming might create a curation requirement, but that's all. You have someone reputable who is retweeting or directing people to the most useful feed (as happens already with breaking news events on Twitter).
You end up watching someone having a dialog with a police officer, or in the middle of a rush, or something. You feel a greater sense of connection knowing that it is happening right now.
The people streaming have no time for editing. Moreover, video editing is unnecessarily painful, so amateurs hardly ever do it. What does happen is the best stuff gets saved and recycled as GIFs/HTML5 short videos.
These new apps are bringing a much more streamlined, accessible method for anyone with a smartphone. People in Ferguson or Egypt likely had a more complex set-up or were posting pre-recorded footage.
Maybe only more complex in that they cost $ to livestream, but I could sit in front of my Roku and watch multiple live streams of Ferguson protests on UStream.
Or a couple hundred car crashes/fatalities. I've already seen two people try to stream from their driver's seat with the phone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other.
Although I think connections help more than not, I think it's more nuanced than that. You have to have a story, something to convince people that they need your app. It has to capture peoples imagination, and it needs to be simple enough that the average user doesn't need to do anything to consume it. And the market needs to be ready for it. Too early is just as bad as too late.
Yes, this is not an original idea at all. But the slick onboarding, clean interface and the promotion are making this a hit (Being on the front page of the Appstore is huge).
It already looks like a hassle to sign up. The onboarding for Periscope is so slick, they take advantage of your Twitter account for one-step signup. I was watching streams in mere seconds.
Looks like a lovely app, but I wonder why did they attempt to pollute the identity space with yet another username?!
Let me give you an example of how this can work against them, which is applicable to other startups.
Let's say, you're an early adopter and you got a nice Twitter username. Unfortunately, you're in the Android camp (me!). So, a new service comes up and some guy gets lucky enough to "steal" your username. You will then feel alienated from that service, because it doesn't solidify your identity. Same happened with Vine in the past.
What's weird as these come out of a company that has invested so much into building a new identity as @username and now they are undermining their investment!
Same happened with Facebook. They launched Slingshot, which invented yet another identity nomenclature. Not that I care about Slingshot, but if I did, it would unconsciously boycott it.
I'm not talking about me personally (yeah, right!), but I'm just trying to think about possible scenarios.
A smart and not so hard to accomplish thing even for the mobile first crowd would be to at least allow account creation on the web. How hard could that be? This way early adopters will blame themselves, not the service, for not being so "early" in the game.
These are just some psychological aspects I wanted to share.
Compared to Meercat, there's a better UI, more ways to explore users to find new content and not as much of a blank slate for new users. After using each less than 5 times, I sort of prefer periscope.
Think about why, in a world with LiveStream, UStream, & YouTube Live Events, people see Meerkat as revolutionary. Also apply that question to Spotify vs Rhapsody.
I agree but there is just no way their recent series B investors (Greylock) let them sell at a valuation of 50M - their post-val on that round was $52M (http://i.imgur.com/9zOonad.png), would be tough to sell on a "cut your losses" basis this early. But I do think Facebook could see the value being well above that, so who knows!
It's not market share - it's revenue, demographics, usage patterns, and time to market that encourage iOS first over Android. While it is true that Android crushes iOS on global market share, the other factors are reversed in iOS's favor. For example: http://www.businessinsider.com/ios-android-shopping-2013-12
Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense. Many Android phones are substantially less expensive than comparable iPhones, and thus act as a stand in for an old Nokia or Ericsson. Those users that purchase inexpensive Android phones often aren't using it as a smartphone - it's just the free or cheap phone they get with their contract, and the use it as a phone first and foremost. This is in direct contrast to the iPhone, where Apple's advertising de-emphasises the "phone" part of the equation.
Also, keep in mind that the HN crowd is mostly interested US/Valley companies. Mobile market share numbers in the US are very different than global market share numbers, which leads to a lot of iOS first development in the US: http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Re... Hence why so many apps on HN seem to be iOS first.
All of this having been said, if the rising trend in Android revenue and engagement keeps up, along with the improvements Google is making to its developer tooling, it's likely that we'll see Android first start to happen. Some of this trend can be seen in the Localytics analysis above, though it isn't the whole story - App Annie's recent report is a great overview: http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-retrospective-2014/
While there will almost certainly be some lag-time between the time that Android first becomes feasible (e.g. now-ish) and businesses actually going Android first due to psychological biases, once it becomes the more profitable option companies will choose it. Until then, iOS first wins.
For every complaint of that which you can document, I could provide 100,000 developers who hunger for a closer relationship with Apple. It's a non-starter. Developer relations contact? Yes please.
The only real, but extremely useful, use case I see for this is for uploading video while it's being shot, because someone might take your phone away. For example, when filming the police, or filming any other disruptive / conflict type of event.
What other reliable apps are there that can do this?
I've been seeing ads for an analytics app called periscope: https://www.periscope.io. For a second, I thought it was them before clicking through. Poor periscope.io.
If you don't want this to happen to your startup, register for a trademark. Since both the twitter program and this analytics ones are apps in the same app stores, I imagine that trademark protection would be broad enough. Twitter's lawyers would have done a trademark search before going live with the app, so the problem would have likely been avoided entirely.
Just streamed what I'm currently working on... felt odd, like letting 14 people into my office, one guy even asked a question "what are you coding?", it didn't have a way to reply by text... which makes sense as you can be either streaming correctly or typing correctly, which is why once that happened the stream got extremely shaky, [sorry for that other viewers]
I think this has potential and it might take a unexpected turn once Carlos Danger gets the news
I run an Internet TV Station for Latin Indie Music Fans here in Austin (estereobit.tv), and one of the core services is live broadcasting, so these sort of apps interest me a lot.
I tried Meerkat during SXSW, but yeah, I'm switching to Periscope. I had users complaining about broken streams, and how they couldn't get the video on time. This could have been due to internet traffic because it's off the charts during SXSW; I'm not sure how it does on smaller events.
Reach worries me for sure. I don't know the details of how that is going down with Twitter though. Another thing that worries me is that I can't save videos. A good show can keep accumulating views forever so having that footage available is important.
Quality is also a big problem. In low-light settings and with loud music, it's hard to get a good show with just the iPhone. I was thinking of investing in a good camera but I don't know how that would work with these apps. Does anyone have any ideas on how could I get through this hurdle?
EDIT: It's over now. It's certainly an interesting platform, and I do think it will catch on if celebrities start doing these types of AMA talks. Personally, I would love to watch someone like Sam, PG, or Fred Wilson do one.
This is great. I really like the design and screenshot ability. Even though Meerkat seemed like the first mover in this space, looks like they might be beaten by periscope with a better execution
I think Periscope is great. Other than the nice logo, Meerkat was always very rough around the edges, Periscope actually looks very nice in comparison.
It also has less latency.
We are obviously looking at the competition very seriously, here at upclose. For now, we have confidence in our ability to compete. Though we haven't managed to ride the hype wave like Meerkat and Periscope, we have steady growth.
We are also the only platform that also exists on web and Android, and with virtually no latency.
I think, it's pretty tough to compete with Twitter. Why? Because people see Twitter already as a micro-journalism platform and live-streaming is more or less live-journalism. Or at least, this is one way to use it and this helps to gain a lot of traction fast.
I never tried any live streaming. If I were to start today, I'd use the platform with the most users and least effort to get into. Which is probably going to be Periscope.
I agree that it is tough to compete with twitter. They have money and a huge reach. Periscope will probably get some advantage when it comes to integration with Twitter.
But there are also downsides to being tied to twitter. For example, I don't expect Periscope to every integrate with Facebook or any other competing platform. Upclose already works with Facebook.
I'm not trying to say that this is going to be easy. I'm just saying that don't count us out yet.
I tried periscope and just now upclose.me. I like that you can I think stream to the web whereas periscope seems app only. Though upclose is not working for me after a minute or so - I'm on a slow connection in Vietnam though.
Hi Tim,
video streaming usually needs a good internet connection. But with upclose, you should still be able to stream reliably to people near you, as we use a peer-to-peer streaming solution.
So I'm guessing Periscope must use HTTP Live Streaming for video? https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ... :
Important: iPhone and iPad apps that send large amounts of audio or video data over cellular networks are required to use HTTP Live Streaming.
Are there any privacy issues using this app? Streams won't load for me unless I disable VPN. I'm not sure if that's an issue with my VPN or simply this app (Twitter) blocking / throttling VPN in general. Anyone else notice this issue?
The killer feature of Periscope is real time communication and its massive distribution channel, which Meerkat lacks. If broadcasters don't see more than a few viewers, they lose interest immediately.
I hope this can help Twitter. It at least feels like one of those things that seems to be much more compatible with the immediacy of the Twitter culture than the Facebook one.
> it's still possible to extract audio from the video you are streaming, if you are perfectly still, streaming high resolution, lossless, 60FPS video of a single object very sensitive to vibrations in the air.
You would have to be trying extremely hard to get a periscope video which could have audio extracted, if it's possible at all with all the compression involved.
I didn't took that into account, thanks! Still much more is nowadays possible then people realise. And it scares me how little some users care about privacy issues when uploading photo's/video's.
Of course it doesn't means someone somewhere is going to try to harm you, but it's possible. It seems like the days where your username was anonymous and it was hard to track it back to you are over. Not sure if that's a good thing :(
I have this strange sense of aversion to Periscope, even though I know it's not logical.
It feels to me like Meerkat was a cool thing built by a bunch of my friends that took off, and then the big blood-sucking corporation (Twitter) tried to rip it off and make some money (even though that's not accurate).
That probably stems from this conversation between Ben (the co-founder of Meerkat), and someone who was building something similar: http://austenallred.com/assets/ph-ben.png
> Pete: "I was working on the exact same app... kind of depressed right now. :("
> Ben: "PETE! What makes you think you're not capable of doing something better/different? It would be a very sad world if people just gave up on ideas. I can tell you that the live video space is still broken in terms of the distribution mechanism, and that obviously Meerkat is not perfect. There's a very good chance that anyone in the world could come up with a better product/perspective. Please, go back to code. That's how we'll all build things better together, even though we'll all work separately - we learn from each other."
How can you not fall in love with that product/company?
Not really. There's a clear difference between Meerkat and Viagra spam: it had a lot of unproven value. Once people starts to use it, it's usually not a waste of time.
Yes, I can blame them. My inbox despite Google's spam filtering is full of Indian offshore developers who believe that hustle trumps all. And that's including my right to have people respect my contact page's clear indication that I don't want to outsource web/SEO work.
When that hustle steps on my turf, yes, I blame them.
Just like always it's never the idea that worth a lot, it's always the execution, how you market it, effort put into it, etc. And I guess luck also plays a big role at times!
This reminds me about the stories how the Pinterest founder went around a campus opening the site on random pc's, how Reddit started out by submitting posts/comments themselves or even how Airbnb developers went out themselves to photograph their users places with their own camera's.
It makes perfect sense: as you say, you fell in love. Love is not logical.
Meerkat crafted a narrative that you became invested in, and they were good at it. You were their target audience. You felt validated and included, and so you became personally invested in their success or failure. Unfortunately, the best narrative advertising in the world doesn't change the spammy tactics or the flaws in the product. Love can't guarantee success.
Meerkat is great too, but clearly has an uphill battle for the next few months after the initial hype. They certainly have passionate initial fans though.
I'd be curious to see with Facebook's dedication to video, especially highlighted at F8, if they would consider swooping up Meerkat right now and offer distribution through their ecosystems. This might just be me, but I have Twitter streaming all day, while I check Facebook maybe 2-3 times sporadically, so it might be a bit tougher to capture attention. But who knows, it will be really fascinating to watch.
I'm assuming Grelock, their recent series B lead, would not be interested in selling so soon after their investment for anything less than 2x. Post-valuation was $52M, probably a few buyers out there at that price but who knows(Full details on their Series B: http://i.imgur.com/9zOonad.png)