Meerkat and Periscope – what’s all the fuss about live streaming?

Live streaming has made the headlines in recent weeks, George Pappas looks how the two players Meerkat and Periscope compare. 

Up until a few weeks ago the only Meerkat I knew about was the small carnivore belonging to the mongoose family and a Periscope was a tube attached to a set of prisms and used as an instrument for observation. Now they are the latest names to enter the rapidly evolving social media marketplace and right royal battle is being waged between which of these two live streaming apps will reign supreme.

Meerkat was the darling of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas this year and was named as the breakout app of the year. Only days later Twitter, no doubt spooked by the attention lavished on Meerkat, launched their competing app called Periscope. Just last week Meerkat received $14 million in new investor funding.

On the same day Twitter went to market with its alternative live streaming app, Periscope. By Sunday night, the Periscope-Meerkat rivalry had already become brutally unbalanced.