Periscope v/s Meerkat: Who’s Winning The Live Streaming Battle?

Livestreaming is the newest, most popular way to tell, nay, show your friends exactly what you’re doing at every moment of every day of your life. Meerkat started it, and even used Twitter’s social graph to connect its users, which was a brilliant social media strategy. But then Twitter bought a competing livestreaming service: Periscope. Dun, Dun, DUN!

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Periscope Redefined Live Video Streaming

Though Meerkat had a headstart in this field of innovative marketing, when Periscope came along, Twitter made sure it swam to the head of the stream super fast. Periscope allows optional replays and private video streaming, apart from the normal live streaming functionality, which made it much more user-friendly, especially for celebrities, who use a complex content strategy. But Meerkat retaliated by introducing new discovery features and Recommendations, which lets you follow video links that your friends have liked. Not to be outdone, Periscope introduced a feature that let users find broadcasts from their friends super easily.

And The Winner Is…

Periscope, for now.

Twitter is leaving no stone unturned to beat Meerkat. They’ve gone to the lengths of encouraging celebrities to give up Meerkat and use Periscope instead. Meerkat, in a bid to keep at least a few of its star users, bagged an exclusive deal with Madonna.

But Twitter had already dealt Meerkat a death-blow. When it started, Meerkat built its app based on Twitter’s social graph. Twitter is cutting off  Meerkat’s access to its social graph after acquiring Periscope. People who remain loyal to Meerkat can still announce on Twitter that they’re streaming a video and hope that people switch apps to watch it, but they will suffer without the automatic notification that access to Twitter’s social graph offered.

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