Meerkat (app)

Meerkat

Meerkat logo
Developer(s) Ben Rubin
Stable release 1.0.1
Development status Active
Operating system iOS
Platform iOS
Size 14.8 MB
Available in English
Type Video streaming, social networking service
Website meerkatapp.co

Meerkat is a live video streaming app available on iOS and Android developed by a team headed by Ben Rubin.[1][2] It quickly found popularity on micro-blogging site Twitter after its debut on the website Product Hunt in March 2015 and the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Meerkat directly links with Twitter accounts, letting people stream a live video to their followers on Twitter.[3]

The back-end of the app was written over two years for previous video product of theirs and have so far enabled them to have as many as 5000 people watching one person's stream.[1]

Reactions

After the release of Meerkat, even before it began to be discovered by celebrities and high-profile users, Twitter announced the acquisition of the app Periscope, after cutting off Meerkat's access to its social graph.[4] Twitter publicly launched Periscope on March 26, 2015. Apart from providing the similar functionality of live-streaming to your Twitter followers, Periscope also gives you an option to let anyone play the stream back.[5]

The company raised $12M in Venture Capital funding from Greylock Partners in March of 2015.[6]

Many entrepreneurs developed tools based on meerkat from #katch[7] that let you save your meerkat stream, #lookats[8] that let you view & chat on meerkat directly from your browser [9]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Ben Rubin interviewed on the TV show Triangulation on the TWiT.tv network
  2. ↑ "Ben Rubin". CrunchBase. AOL Inc. Retrieved 28 March 2015.
  3. ↑ John Patrick Pullen (2015-03-14). "You Asked: What Is the Meerkat App?". Time. Retrieved 2015-03-14.
  4. ↑ "Twitter cripples Meerkat by cutting off access to its social graph". Venture Beat. 2015-03-13. Retrieved 2015-03-28.
  5. ↑ "Periscope, Twitter's answer to Meerkat-style live streaming, is now available". The Verge. The Verge. 2015-03-26. Retrieved 2015-03-26.
  6. ↑ http://www.businessinsider.com/meerkat-raises-12-million-2015-3
  7. ↑ "katchkats/". katchkats. 2015-04-15. Retrieved 2015-04-20.
  8. ↑ "lookats/". lookats. 2015-04-15. Retrieved 2015-04-20.
  9. ↑ "http://wwwhatsnew.com/2015/04/01/lookats-com-para-buscar-y-ver-en-vivo-los-videos-en-streaming-de-periscope-y-de-meerkat/". wwwhatsnew. 2015-03-13. Retrieved 2015-03-28.