This video was brought to you by us: Slidebean. Make beautiful slide presentations in no time. Get one free month by signing up at slidebean.com/youtube. Today’s episode of Startup Forensics is
about live-streaming apps, something that we all take very much for granted today as
we’re not impressed anymore by seeing anyone going live on social media, to broadcast whatever
from their phones. Literally, whatever... which is probably part
of the problem here, but we’ll get into that later on. While the idea of live broadcasting is anything
but new, back in 2014-2015 it took the internet by storm when mobile applications made it
easier for people to broadcast with just a tap, and most importantly, made it easier
for audiences to connect with streamers. Before this, a live broadcast required a lot
more technical stuff and that’s why it was reserved for television studios or websites
like Livestream. So, back then when the idea of live-streaming
from smartphones was fresh, and the race to win that social media branch was just beginning,
two particular apps held a death match to become #1: Meerkat and Periscope. In this episode, we will review some key events
of this battle, some differences between the apps, the role Twitter had in the story and
finally, who won and where the winner stands in today. This is Startup Forensics. First, it was Meerkat, the live streaming
app that became hot thanks to the 2015 SXSW, where it drew the public’s attention and
gained traction at a pace that made everyone think it could be something big. The app had launched just a few days before
the festival and got there without a lot of marketing money or sponsorships, but quickly
broke through the endgame: users and word of mouth. They reported their userbase doubled during
the festival and got to a few hundreds of thousands, also getting lifts from popular
characters who jumped on board, like Jimmy Fallon who broadcasted and twitted using the
app on the event. But even after the SXSW buzz, other celebrities
like Jared Leto or Madona kept it alive and the community started looking big and strong. Of course, there had been previous applications
attempting to make live streaming social and earn that space, but they all failed. Meerkat was simple enough and was the first
one to succeed in making it cool and social. But it did so by completely piggybacking on
Twitter. So, let’s do a quick throwback here and
see how the app worked. To start, you could sign up with your Twitter
account of course, and just like that have all of your followers available in Meerkat
too. The home page was simple: you could see a
list of currently live streams and you were prompted to type in what was happening, very
much in Twitter’s fashion, then hit the stream button to start transmitting with your
phone right away, or schedule it for later. In any case, as soon as you tapped one of
those, all of your contacts on Twitter would get notified and get the link to jump into
Meerkat to tune in. The stream allowed viewers to like and comment
in real-time, all of which was posted as well on the tweet, that could also be retweeted. In a nutshell, Meerkat’s whole reach to
the audience relied on Twitter’s platform. But their party got to an end soon, just shortly
after Twitter acquired Periscope for $86M, in March 2015. Twitter was betting hard on video and had
acquired Vine just a few months earlier. Check out our video on Vine, to find out what
happened. Only a few days before Meerkat’s breakthrough
in SXSW, Twitter acquired the other app that could do what Meerkat did, but better. This was a kick in the butt for Meerkat, not
only because of having a strong new competitor now, but also because Twitter did restrict
some of Meerkat’s features that relied on their platform, seriously harming its social
component. According to Ben Rubin, Meerkat’s founder,
Twitter did this with a very short notice of only a couple of hours before pulling the
plug, crippling their ability to react. Twitter’s actions severely affected Meerkat
of course, but also validated the market space and Meerkat had done enough to be able to
raise a $12M series B, at a $40M valuation according to Techcrunch. Yeah, 2015 was a big year for live streaming
apps and that’s how fierce and fast the competition was, blow by blow. That investment round was led by Greylock
Partners and one of the investors named Josh Elman posted a very optimistic note on Medium,
where he even referenced the symbiosis of Meerkat with Twitter. Some argued that it would’ve made more sense
for Twitter to acquire Meerkat and leverage all the connections the app already had with
it. But as you know, they followed Periscope’s
development instead, apparently not paying much attention to Meerkat’s incursion in
their platform, and finally went the Periscope route, despite Meerkat was already a trend
on Twitter and Periscope hadn’t even launched yet. Now, let’s talk about Periscope. In essence, It did pretty much the same as
Meerkat but users reported that it did a better job handling delays in live streams and the
UI overall was better, which ultimately just facilitated the social factor. This made sense because Periscope’s development
took about a year while Meerkat took just around ten weeks to come to life, and that
resulted in Periscope delivering a more polished product and experience. Back in its early days, Periscope founders
Kayvon Beykpor and Joe Bernstein said they wanted to create the closest thing possible
to teleportation. Yeah, somehow the idea of being able to watch
a live video broadcast of whatever you wanted to see from your phone, appealed to them as
something close to teleporting, back in 2014. Periscope founders have talked about how the
idea was born when Bernstein was traveling in Istanbul and protests burst in Taksim Square. He then wanted to have real-time information
and visual input of the development of the protests, but all he could get were tweets
from people claiming to be there. So, from there they dreamed a future in which
you could just pick up your phone and tune in to watch and be transported to any place
or experience, in real-time. Yet another key difference Periscope had with
Meerkat, was that live streams could be replayed if the streamer decided to keep them. This probably gave Periscope an advantage
and it relates to a fundamental fact of consuming content on the internet: its nature is asynchronous. That’s right, the social media mindset isn’t
really one for appointment viewing and our feeds are more and more asynchronous every
time. This means you should probably look for ways
to make your content available to more people, adapting to their behavior and schedule and
not the other way around. Unless you are famous or broadcasting a big
event, chances are you’re going to struggle to find an audience for your live stream. A stroll on a beautiful beach sunset or your
kid’s theater play may have value for those close to you, but would hardly appeal to a
larger audience. Now, say your kid does something funny in
the play, or something unexpected happens while walking on the beach, and suddenly the
video may be interesting for others, but the synchronicity of watching it in real-time
just loses relevance. That’s ultimately a reality that both Meerkat
and Periscope or any other social live-streaming app have to fight with. Still, by August 2015 more than 10M Periscope
accounts had been created and nearly 2M used the app on a daily basis. However, by that time the app churn rates
were high as well, some sources reported it being as high as 50%. And it was doing better than Meerkat. Now, just as you could’ve imagined and expected,
looking at the big picture it was only a matter of time before the big brother came into the
live streaming game. That’s right, in August 2015 Facebook did
what everyone expected it to do sooner or later and released Facebook live, becoming
the final boss to defeat. Youtube live had existed for a while now but
wasn’t by nature as mobile-centered at that time. Already being king of social media, Facebook
was already much more than just live broadcasts and it was the natural thing to do. So, for the rest of 2015 and until late 2016,
Meerkat continued fighting, releasing some interesting features like allowing to stream
using GoPro cameras or the developer platform and APIs. Periscope did their thing too, with features
like an analytics dashboard for the streamers or a map integration to see live broadcasts
around the world by their location. But eventually, in September 2016 Meerkat
went belly up and its account on Twitter was shut down and made private. Shortly after, it got removed from the Appstore,
leaving Periscope victorious and ready for the real fight against Facebook. Ben Rubin, Meerkat founder himself, acknowledged
that the category of broadcast (one-to-many) wasn’t breaking as a daily habit to rely
on completely, and it was too far away from the everyday user. By the time Meerkat died, the team had been
working on a new project for about six months, an app called Houseparty. This one is still available in the Appstore
and it’s something like video-chatting with groups of friends. It does not seem to do much more than what
you can do with, say, Facetime, but still, it has managed to survive longer than Meerkat
and without all the hype. Surprisingly enough, Periscope has made it
through and is still alive today too, but all the buzz and the excitement are gone. No need to say that Facebook Live became the
social live streaming king, pretty much since it launched and leveraged the almost 2B monthly
active users it had by that time. Not a lot of analysis is required to know
that any social app trying to dethrone Facebook will go against the odds. We’re not really sure about what keeps Periscope
going, considering the staggering competition, not only from Facebook but also from Youtube
or Instagram. Casually logging into Periscope can be a rather
underwhelming experience, as you scroll down a bunch of boring-looking streams, each with
a handful of viewers. There are other use cases of course, but Facebook
also dominates those ones, being the ground where brands and celebrities already advertise
and monetize. So, just for the sake of numbers, here are
a few stats of Facebook Live and Periscope although the comparison may even look foolish. In 2018, Facebook’s live broadcasts reached
3.5B, while Periscope had only passed the 200M milestone in late 2016. That same year, Periscope users viewed
an average of 110 years worth of video time, daily. Well, Facebook users now view an average of
3000 years worth of video time daily, and that’s more than 26M hours of video viewed
on a daily basis. That’s jaw-dropping. In conclusion, live video streaming isn’t
a great stand alone for social media and it requires exposure to a fairly big audience
and userbase, to sustain interest. Just like Meerkat did in its early days leveraging
a connection with Twitter, and ultimately as Facebook did it with its own platform,
remaining the true winner of live video streaming and social media overall.
