After a year and a half working on his video startup, Yevvo, Ben Rubin had started to think about pulling the plug. The app had been conceived as a way of letting you share live video with your friends, but soon accrued a set of arguably useless features: location tagging, text comments, a variety of login options. Yevvo had acquired 400,000 users since launching in August 2013, but most weren’t very active. “There was no heartbeat,” Rubin says.
In December, Rubin killed it for good, emailing the app’s users to let them know that Yevvo was no more. On February 27th, he unveiled its replacement: a radically simplified iOS app for broadcasting live video to your Twitter followers. The dead-simple app has two options: you can schedule a stream for later, or start one now. When it starts, a tweet notifies your followers that you’re broadcasting. They can follow along and comment as they watch. Rubin called the app Meerkat, and within hours, video streams tagged with the app’s name began appearing in the timelines of thousands of Twitter users.
MEERKAT STREAMS INCREASED 100 PERCENT FROM THURSDAY TO FRIDAY
Some people gave video tours of their offices. Others showed viewers around their houses. Buzzfeed‘s Mat Honan gave a tour of San Francisco’s somewhat seedy Civic Center neighborhood. Over at TechCrunch, a reporter used Meerkat to broadcast more than two hours of himself talking about Meerkat. It’s all a little silly, sure, but silliness is a good sign in a new social app: things that are fun tend to draw repeat customers.
In its first week, Meerkat acquired 28,000 users. On Thursday, 18,000 of them watched at least one stream; the number of streams watched increased 100 percent from Thursday to Friday. Incredibly, to anyone who has watched one of the shaky-handed, vaguely blurry footage that accounts for most Meerkat streams, more than one-third of users are watching for two or more hours per day.
Meerkat, in other words, is Twitter’s obsession of the moment. Like many seeming overnight successes, it was a long time coming and benefited from a combination of hard-won startup wisdom, influential early fans, and luck. Rubin spent the past week trying to answer the question of why Meerkat has taken off, and he has started to settle on an answer: “spontaneous togetherness.” “It sounds horrible,” Rubin groans. “It sounds like the most cliché, cheesy thing ever. But that’s what it is!
Rubin may worry his big idea sounds cheesy, but it actually goes a long way to explain why so many of us are clicking the awkward “LIVE NOW! #Meerkat” tweets we’re seeing in our timelines. A Meerkat stream is an invitation to escape, guided by someone you already know. When it works, it’s really fun — and it’s easy to see how it could develop into a commonly used tool for broadcasting. (Also it’s easy to see why so many companies have tried to build businesses around live broadcasting before: Justin.tv, Ustream, and notorious Silicon Valley flop Color, to name just three.)
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Rubin credits the thinking behind Meerkat to James Currier, an investor in Yevvo and an adviser to the company. It was Currier who told Rubin to focus on doing one thing well. They developed two concepts: one for sharing live video with small groups of friends, similar to Yevvo, and one for broadcasting over Twitter, which they fast-tracked under the name Meerkat. Over a series of meetings, they developed Meerkat’s concept of spontaneous togetherness. In their early tests, they found something delightful in the interactions between the broadcaster and their audience: the audience always wound up helping direct the broadcast with their comments, to the general enjoyment of everyone involved.
A FOCUS ON DOING ONE THING WELL
The initial version of Meerkat was built by Rubin’s co-founder, Itai Danino, in eight days. (“The client is all duct tape,” Rubin says.) The app was submitted to Product Hunt, Silicon Valley’s favorite cool-hunting destination of late, and quickly rose to No. 1 for the day. As the influential Product Hunt audience tweeted out their streams, Meerkat gained near-total awareness among the early adopter crowd, and Rubin announced that the app had gone from side project to full-time focus.
Over the weekend, Rubin and his 11-person team planned to hack together an app for Android users that would let them watch streams; a full-featured Android app is on its way. The bigger task by far is to sustain last week’s momentum into this one. Rubin is aware of how fast the hype cycle can turn — he went through it once with Yevvo, after all — but for now, the 27-year-old former architecture student says he is happy just to build Meerkat and watch people find uses for it. “If the product is really good, you should get value from day one — and then come back on day two,” he says. “If it’s relevant, it will stick. That’s my mission with Meerkat.”
At the same time, many of Meerkat’s core features had been implemented by its predecessors: logging in with Twitter, comments that turn into tweets, and the main idea of broadcasting from a mobile device. Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv, noted that his company had tried all three before successfully pivoting into Twitch, the video-game streaming platform acquired by Amazon last year. So had Ustream, Livestream, Qik, and Bambuser. “I think it’s hard to provide value to the random person in broadcasting: most of the time when they go live, few people will watch, and there won’t be much interactivity,” Kan told me via email. “It’s hard to know what to do as a broadcaster — even today I have viewers but no idea of what I should do on the service.
“MAYBE THEY WILL FIGURE OUT WHAT THE REST OF US DIDN’T!”
“That’s not to say they won’t be successful,” Kan added. “Maybe they will figure out what the rest of us didn’t!”
Given its close association with Twitter, there was immediate speculation Twitter might acquire Meerkat or build live-streaming video into its own apps. On Wednesday, TechCrunch reported Twitter was in talks to buy Periscope, which is said to be similar to Meerkat and currently in private beta. The Verge confirmed that the talks have taken place. (Neither Twitter nor Periscope responded to requests for comment.)
Still, the mere speculation points at a truth: live video broadcasting just feels like it belongs on Twitter. The company has already become, in its own admittedly self-serving formulation, “the operating system for news.” Many of the celebrities, publishers, journalists, and other notable personalities on the platform could stand to benefit from having a quick, one-tap way of sharing what they were seeing to a global audience. Put another way — is CNN more valuable to you as a channel on your television or a push notification that opens to a live stream of a major world event?
Maybe Meerkat will fade before we ever find out. Or maybe Twitter will announce it has acquired Periscope, and we’ll use that instead. But after a week of Meerkat, live video inside social networks feels inevitable. It’s coming to stay, one way or another.