Today Meerkat, the app that generated much of the attention last year around live streaming video from a mobile device, is going public with the news that it’s officially changing course and building a new product toward that end.
It was a long time coming. Meerkat definitely had a base of some consistent users, and some brands even experimented with it. But for months, many wondered what was up with Meerkat as Periscope picked up usage after Twitter acquired it. Then Facebook started pushing hard on its own live streaming tool.
It turns out that competition from the two popular social networks did play a part in the decision to go in a different decision, or pivot, in Silicon Valley parlance.
“The distribution advantages of Twitter/Periscope and Facebook Live drew more early users to them away from us and we were not able to grow as quickly alongside as we had planned,” Meerkat cofounder and chief executive Ben Rubin wrote in a memo he sent to the startup’s employees a couple of weeks ago. Today Meerkat published the memo on Medium, following the publication of a Re/code article on the news.
But maybe it’s not as simple as Twitter and Facebook “going live” in the way that Meerkat did. The medium of live streaming in general might actually be ahead of its time — something that has only taken off with certain types of early adopters. Rubin explains in the memo:
So far, the value proposition of being live is just not clear to people who are not celebrities/media/news. If you are one of them (and particularly if you have an existing audience on Facebook or Twitter), there is clear value in occasionally going live as a new way to bring content to your audience or interact with them. This is especially true around existing live events with behind the scenes content, etc. But for most regular people – it has been hard to figure out when or even why to go live. It’s different than sharing photographs – think of it this way: before Instagram, people already knew what constituted a beautiful photo and tried to take them. With live video no one really knows what “good” live video they can create is.
At least the startup hasn’t lost money. Greylock Partners and others invested $14 million in Meerkat a year ago.
Why live streaming app Meerkat is pivoting
from VentureBeat » Social Media Companies | Social Network News | VentureBeat http://ift.tt/1QSZ3jV
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