Meerkat is a new app that lets you livestream video onto YouTube. Launched on February 27th, after the founder closed down his previous app, it's suddenly become very buzzy and inevitably brands are starting to see what they can do with it.
It's for streaming live video, and nothing remains after the live stream, giving it a bit of Snapchat ephemeral quality. It's easy to see how individuals - this footage was posted of a storm in Sydney - and even news organisations could use it - for example Laurie Segall of CNN has shown people the newsroom - it's great for showing people an authentic, unedited view of what's happening now.
It currently feels very 'ham radio' - shaky quality, and generally just people saying 'hello world', but like lots of these things (& ham radio), there's potential to do interesting things.
One brand using it is Starbucks. Starbucks has used it to stream from their Roastery - quite a good way of letting people into their world. However I'm not sure it would have been better than doing a video on a more established platform, like Vine or Instagram.
CNBC has also used it, for example to show the ringing of the opening bell at the NYSE. Again, there's not much reason why this had to be live only - footage that could be saved would be (I'd argue) better.
I'm also surprised that none of the fashion brands has used it at this week's Paris Fashion Week.
More examples to come as I find them - in fact I've been searching all day without success - it's certainly not as easy as finding brands who used Hyperlapse in the early days.
(You can find new ones by searching Twitter for mrk.tv - click on the most recent ones and the chances are they'll still be live)
More background on Meerkat here
Plus - Twitter is rumoured to be buying Periscope, a similar service
1 comment:
Meerkat is the same service as Bambuser, who did this already in 2010 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambuser
Post a Comment