Periscope Or Meerkat? Be Confused No More

Live streaming sites Periscope and Meerkat have been a hot topic around the internet. In this post, managing director of social media agency Evolve Social, David Wesson, looks at both offerings.

Quite literally over the past 72 hours whilst on Periscope I have seen the Cherry blossom in Tokyo, thanks to Cooori, had a guided tour of the mission district in San Francisco courtesy of SF beautiful, been clubbing in Las Vegas and learnt how to render things in Virtual Reality thanks to VR playhouse in California and I can’t wait to find out what is next!

It has been a real blast trying out the app myself and watching the world do the same in real time and the conclusion I came to after a weekend of being glued to my mobile phone is that Periscope along with Meerkat have literally changed the way we interact with mobile phones in real-time forever.

So what are the main difference’s between Periscope and Meerkat?

1. Periscope has hearts-double tap the screen to see love hearts emanate from the bottom right hand corner of the screen to show your love of the content being shown. It’s a neat feature that really sets Periscope apart.

2. Periscope makes discovering other peoples stream’s easier through twitters social graph whereas Meerkat recently had this feature cut off by Twitter who own periscope.

3. Periscope comments tend to take over the screen when their are multiple comments occurring whereas to their credit Meerkat has scrollable comments which take up less screen real estate than the periscope’s.

4. Meerkat viewer numbers grow more steadily over the length of the stream time whereas Periscope numbers drop off much quicker.

5. Periscope does not switch from Landscape to portrait very intuitively and reading comments is not easy as a result.

6. Periscope has the ability to promote previous streams for 24 hrs whereas Meerkat simply saves to your Camera roll and can only be watched Live.

7. Periscope also lets creators privately broadcast to specific people and take their video down after the live-stream is over, if they choose.

Our prediction is that Periscope will quickly outgrow its competitor as it updates its features and more people discover the app through Twitter’s Social graph.

How are brands using it?

The biggest change we have seen initially is in people covering live events.

News organisations have embraced the app already with the much publicised ‘Fire in New York’ last week which had news organisations rushing to it use it and cover it live.

Talking about the Fire TNW said that Periscope and live video are changing the internet forever. Richard Gutjahr said in his article on the fire that ‘Livestream is the new mainstream’.

Sports organisations have been quick to jump on board with Adidas streaming James Rodriquez penning a new sponsorship deal whereas Wrestlemania have given us a behind the scenes view with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

IHeartRadio Awards Red Carpet and Mashable’s UK Social Good conference have all been quick to provide behind the scenes footage via Periscope.

So whether you are launching a new product, or running your own event of any size the opportunities for marketing and promoting at this point in time seem to be endless.

If you cannot find any Live streams on Periscope just go to twitter and type in “Periscope” and whole new world will open up before you.

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