Meerkat was a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

that enabled users to broadcast live video

streaming Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

through their mobile device. Once signed up, Meerkat users had the option of connecting their

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

accounts, to stream directly to their followers as soon as they went live. The app was available for both

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

and

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

. The app was released in February 2015, and quickly found popularity after its debut on the website

Product Hunt Product Hunt is an American website to share and discover new products. It was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013. Users submit products, which are listed in a linear format by day. The site includes a comments system and a voting system si ...

, as well as widespread use during the

South by Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in m ...

Interactive Festival, both in March 2015. On October 4, 2016, Meerkat was shut down. It has been replaced by Houseparty.

Development

Meerkat was developed by Life On Air, Inc., a team headed by founder and CEO Ben Rubin. The back-end powering the app was developed over the course of two years for a previous video product of theirs. The company raised $12 million in

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

funding from Greylock Partners in March 2015. On October 4, 2016, The app was withdrawn from the App Store and Play Store, and all services have stopped. The Meerkat website now redirects to the creator's new app, Houseparty. The creators have said that the new app "has been in development for 10 months, and moves away from public broadcasts in favour of private chats."

Twitter reaction

In March 2015, weeks after the release of Meerkat,

cut off Meerkat's access to its

social graph The social graph is a graph that represents social relations between entities. In short, it is a model or representation of a social network, where the word graph has been taken from graph theory. The social graph has been referred to as "the ...

, then announced the acquisition of the competing app

Periscope A periscope is an instrument for observation over, around or through an object, obstacle or condition that prevents direct line-of-sight observation from an observer's current position. In its simplest form, it consists of an outer case with ...

. Twitter publicly launched Periscope on March 26, 2015. Apart from providing the similar functionality of live-streaming to users' Twitter followers, Periscope also gives users an option to let anyone play the stream back.

References

{{Internet streaming services 2015 software Android (operating system) software IOS software Twitter services and applications Live streaming services Defunct social networking services