Oh, the Meerkat, such a resilient creature. After the launch of Twitter-owned Periscope back in May, many had written the epitaph of the SXSW-hero, live-streaming app. But it's never given up - despite Twitter cutting it off from it's social graph, despite Periscope quickly establishing market dominance, Meerkat has continued on. They recently announced an embeddable player, as well as an interesting and innovative partnership deal with Discovery Channel, live-streaming behind-the-scenes footage from Shark Week - a deal which caused industry watchers to raise their eyebrows once again - "maybe Meerkat's not dead?" Now Meerkat's underlined its presence again, announcing a major update with some new, market-leading features that might just see Meerkat coming back into vogue. Here's what they announced:
Making an Appearance
The first element of the update is a new feature called "Cameo". Just as it sounds, Cameo enables other users to make an appearance on your Meerkat live-stream for up to 60 seconds at a time, effectively taking over your stream. Here's how it works (from the official announcement):
· Tap on a viewer's profile and invite them to cameo into your stream. Alternatively, comment "Cameo @username".
· Once accepted, for up to sixty seconds the viewer takes over the stream
· Both people can end the cameo at any time, at which point the video returns to the broadcaster who started the stream
Pretty great, huh? In the announcement post, Meerkat says:
"When we launched Meerkat we didn't want to just recreate broadcast TV on the phone. We wanted to create collaborative experiences, shared audience and radical participation all in video and all on your phone.
The true power of being able to use your phone for live video is creating "broadcast with" experiences. The power of participation is why we created Meerkat and why we are focused on pushing live video beyond "broadcast to".
The addition of Cameo is a great one, and one which will no doubt be alluring to a lot of live-streaming regulars. Live-streaming, in itself, is something of an art, not everyone can do it well. As such, there are already groups and communities of live-streamers who collaborate and meet-up (virtually and physically), connected by their live-streaming personas. Adding the ability for them to cameo on each others' streams will be welcomed with open arms. The feature will facilitate greater community, whilst also enabling users to piggy-back off-of each others' collective social followings to boost overall view counts - when a cameo invitation is accepted, the new participants' followers will receive a notification that they're making a cameo, alerting a whole new group of users to the stream.
The Cameo addition opens up a whole new range of creative possibilities for Meerkat streams and no doubt streamers' minds are already racing, thinking of what they'll be able to do with this feature. It's an intelligent innovation, and definitely helps support Meerkat's focus on community and creative collaboration. One use I can already see for this - celebrities will be able to jump in on streams to help promote products and events - imagine getting a notification that your favourite musician wants to jump in on your stream?
Booking In
The second element of the update will enable users to use their Facebook profile to sign-up for Meerkat. That's right, you no longer need a Twitter account, further severing ties from their initial roots - roots that dried up when Twitter cut off Meerkat's access to their social graph. Via Facebook log-in for Meerkat, friends and fans will receive notifications any time a page or person they follow starts streaming. This is another great addition, especially for users who have more of a following on Facebook than Twitter. Brands will be able to better utilize Meerkat streams to increase Facebook reach - though it'll be interesting to see how the comments system works and is received by the wider Facebook community.
When commenting via Twitter, your tweets can seem random, as you're posting on the stream, but also live in Twitter - in the Facebook world, will comments shared to friends' News Feeds be beneficial or an annoyance for connections of commenters? Meerkat notes that "nothing will be automatically posted to your Facebook timeline when you go live, schedule or comment in streams".
Memories
The last element of the update is a "Meerkat Library" - storage of all your previous Meerkat streams. This is the feature many users have been calling for, a way to keep old streams and re-share them. What's more, the Meerkat library will enable users to share only the streams they choose - so if you do a average Meerkat stream and you don't really want it saved for posterity, you can get rid of it. But if you're keen to showcase your best live-streaming work, you'll now have the option to do so. By default, any stream you save will be set to private and viewable only by you.
This is a great addition, and will be applauded by live-streaming users everywhere. Now, instead of losing that awesome stream you did at that well-known event, you'll be able to save it and link people back to it. Hopefully the library capacity extends to embedded Meerkat content - it'd be great to be able to embed a live-stream on your site, then embed the saved version of that stream to have on your page permanently for those who missed it. But even if that's not an option, the ability to "officially" save your streams (as opposed to utilising third-party workarounds to save your content) will be hugely beneficial.
All in all, this is a great and exciting update for Meerkat - and no doubt, this will get more users looking their way and trying out these new features. While Periscope still holds the lead in terms of overall use, Meerkat is still going along okay, and they've built a very dedicated and passionate user base, a user base that will be buoyed by these updates. Of course, the question will remain over who'll come out on top - just today another live-streaming challenger hit the headlines, with Rhinobird barging onto the market with improved features, particularly in regards to capturing multiple perspectives of a live-streamed event.
But really, the question is not so much about who'll win out as opposed to whether different apps with similar functionality can hold enough market share to survive. If Meerkat's going to keep pushing the envelope with innovations like this, I sincerely hope they do stick around, as it'll means we'll reap the benefits of great new features, rather than seeing a single dominant player resting on their heels.
It's great to have Meerkat upping the ante in live-streaming - and there's so much opportunity, so many ways this functionality can be used. I, for one, am excited to see how these new updates will be utilized in the wild.