So this week gave us a pretty blunt lesson in what happens when you build your whole app on top of someone else's platform and that someone else also happens to be your biggest competitor's parent company. I'm talking about Periscope and Meerkat, and if you haven't been paying attention to the live-streaming app fight, buckle up for a minute because it's a good one.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Meerkat came out of nowhere at SXSW a couple weeks back and became the app everyone at the conference was obsessively using to broadcast panels and parties and, from what I could tell scrolling through it, a lot of people just walking around talking to their phones. It got something like tens of thousands of downloads in a few days, which for a scrappy little startup app is enormous. Then last Friday, Twitter quietly cut Meerkat off from its social graph, meaning the app could no longer pull in your Twitter followers to help you find people to watch. No warning that I saw, just gone. Turns out Twitter had already bought a rival app called Periscope back in January, before Periscope had even shipped a real product, reportedly for somewhere around $100 million. Wild number for an app nobody outside a small circle had used yet.
Periscope finally landed on the App Store this past Thursday and I've had it on my phone since about ten minutes after I saw the notification. My first impression: it's slicker than Meerkat, no surprise given the resources behind it, and the little floating hearts thing when people like your stream (yes, it's basically the Snapchat hearts, don't pretend it isn't) is kind of charming for about the first three streams you watch. By stream four it's just visual noise.
Saturday morning I spent about twelve minutes watching a guy in what he said was Cardiff feed pigeons in the rain. No commentary, just him, a bag of bread, and roughly thirty pigeons that seemed extremely committed to the bit. I don't know why I stayed that long. That's kind of the whole appeal and the whole problem with this format right now — there's no curation, no way to know if what you're clicking into is going to be interesting or just a guy and some pigeons, and somehow I'm not even mad about it.
A few actual complaints though, because I don't want this to read like a press release. Battery drain is rough, my phone went from 80% to 40% in maybe 25 minutes of watching streams. Video is vertical-only, which I get for a phone-first app but it still looks strange stretched on anything bigger than the screen it was shot on. And replays disappear after 24 hours unless the broadcaster saves them, so half the good stuff I wanted to show my roommate was just gone by the time I tried.
The part that sticks with me isn't really about either app, it's about the Meerkat team. These are people who built something that actually caught fire, organically, at exactly the right conference at exactly the right moment, and then had the rug pulled out from under them by a platform they didn't own and couldn't control. I've watched this happen with Twitter's API before (remember when half the third-party Twitter client ecosystem got strangled a few years back, RIP to a bunch of apps I genuinely liked more than the official one), and it never stops feeling a little cold-blooded, even when it's obviously the smart business move for Twitter.
And look, I know how this SXSW app-of-the-moment thing usually goes. Every year there's one breakout darling that every tech blog writes the same three paragraphs about, and by August half of them are ghost towns. I'm not going to pretend I know Periscope avoids that fate just because Twitter's backing it. Being owned by a giant doesn't automatically mean people keep opening the app in June.
Anyway. Meerkat says they're not going anywhere and they've apparently raised a decent chunk of money to prove it, so we'll see. In the meantime I've got a guy in Cardiff to check on.