AUSTIN—Meerkat is either the most annoying or groundbreaking app to strike it big at the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Live-streaming video, particularly on Twitter, has incredible potential: Meerkat has already been used to show the world a demonstration from Ferguson and a U.S. Secretary of Commerce swearing-in ceremony. But most of the 3-week-old iOS app’s 100,000-plus users are live-streaming complete garbage, like endless shaky clips of other people using Meerkat.
Early adopters, journalists, and brands love Meerkat because it’s a new platform to experiment with, but that doesn’t mean much in terms of longterm mainstream success. There’s a virtual graveyard full of apps that caught on at SXSW and promptly flamed out in the real world. But Meerkat has two advantages: More than two years of back-end development work to ensure high-quality live-streaming, and competition from Twitter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here