Meerkat Interview: Will Live Streaming Video Take Over Social Media?

A couple months back, the team at 7 Days Theory was using the Meerkat app and started to love the feel of it and the unique nature of what the app was doing with live video. So, we reached out to their team and spoke with Ryan Cooley on a phone interview. He talks about how Meerkat first got started; what it is, and where they are positioned to be in the future + a whole lot more. We hope you enjoy this insightful interview…

How do you start Meerkat, what was the initial Idea?

Our team has been doing live streaming now for over two years now. The company was originally founded in 2012 and we launched our first product in 2013 called Yevvo it was a live stream product that was created to stream between you and your friends, your family, and people that you know really personally and intimately. It was best designed for example, You’re at your friends birthday party and half of your friends are up in Seattle and some other people that you care about that couldn’t be there, so you press a button on your phone and you stream to those people.

We scaled to about half a million users, most of them were in Mexico, which wasn’t a strategic move, it’s where we saw our greatest adoption. We had a retention problem, we had issues with people understanding the concept of live video, they thought it was a cool as a novelty but they never really got it as something that they could incorporate into their lives past that.

So what we did is we said, “Alright guys, we’re having a great time, we wan’t to continue to support you but clearly we didn’t create the right product for you because you’re not into it.” We needed to make a hard decision, so we decided to take the app off of the app store and figure out a new way of introducing live stream as a really meaningful medium for people to communicate with. So we set out to develop 6 different apps in the course of the next 10 months after we took the other one off of the app store. Each with it’s own particular flavor of live streaming so, Meerkat was streamed live to everyone on twitter. We had one that was like anonymously streamed live video to everyone within a mile of you. Another one was streamed live video to everyone in your address book, which was a much more similar to Yevvo. So we had 6 of these ideas and the first one that we actually managed to get into the app store was Meerkat and lucky for us it was kind of a hit from the start. So that’s where it came from.

It’s been our dream to have live video play a role like it’s playing now.

What’s the culture at Meerkat like right now? Did the culture change when you’re app started to take off?

So, we’ve seen viral growth in the past and we know that viral growth comes and viral growth goes so just because Meerkat started to get adopted very quickly in the United States didn’t make us believe in our minds, “That we’ve done it and we made it.” Because, in Mexico City we saw 300,000 users join in the course of 2 weeks, which is almost as impressive as what we’ve seen in Meerkat. For us, it was validating that our ability to innovate and iterate around this core experience of participatory live streaming is starting to pay off, that we’re getting it in some way. That’s validating. The fact that there is a conversation about it that is taking place in mainstream media is validating. It’s been our dream to have live video play a role like it’s playing now. It’s starting to be at the forefront of conversations around emerging social media. That, for us is the most exciting part. Whether you’re talking about Meerkat or Periscope, or any other streaming app. Culturally, I think we’ve gotten more focused, generally speaking the culture has stayed the same. It’s a culture of thinking very critically about ourselves and asking how we iterate and innovate around one core experience and really make it valuable. We still haven’t nailed it. We have a long way to go. Any company has a long way to go.

What are some of the coolest and most valuable ways that you’ve seen people using the app since the growth started happing?

Real time news distribution doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see why it’s valuable and how it integrates really well into live streaming. I’ve loved watching that whole community emerge out of Meerkat, whether it’s political journalists, whether it’s breaking news journalists, whether it’s entertainment journalists, they’re all covering all sorts of things that are happening al around the world and now you’re consuming them in real time and actually participating in them becoming part of the news. This is a feeling that Twitter was able to give to a lot of people from the start because it allowed journalist a direct channel to their audience with out having to go through all the traditional publishing channels. So it was very complimentary to what they were already doing. It was complimentary to the premium content that they were pushing out through their outlets. So we think we’re doing kinda the same thing, in a much more rich and engaging way. That’s valuable to us.

We see a huge opportunity in music of course. Several musicians have started to use the app to bring their audience and to bring their fans into their process. Which I think is fascinating for anybody to see how an artist gets down and creates these uber beautiful and polished pieces of music and pieces of content in general. So, that’s been really interesting for us to see. We’ve seen a million different use-cases.

The political community has embraced it in a way that we could have never imagined. We’re seeing politicians like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and by the way as a company we’re politic agnostic, but we happen to see a lot of Republican politicians joining. Various governors, secretary of commerce, Penny Pritzker, Casey Haun of MSNBC, who is kind of like the up and coming Rachel Maddow. We’re seeing them use this to bring transparency to the political process, day to day. It’s interesting for me to have direct access to Jeb Bush whether I’m a Jeb Bush supporter or not. It’s interesting that he has a way of circumventing these traditional media channels and getting a direct portal to his constituents in a way that’s totally unfiltered while being real and authentic. And that’s something that I think people crave from most of politics because politics and politicians are so closely associated with smokes and mirrors and putting on a show and keeping up appearances, this allows them to be real and communicate who they are in an authentic way with an audience, who is their constituents.

What have been some of the most exciting moments that your team has seen on Meerkat?

We watched the march in Selma and we also watched the protests in Ferguson a couple months back there were 4 BBC reporters who were on the ground who were reporting it from all types of different angels. It had this real wowing effect because all of a sudden it felt like you were there in Ferguson. Not only were you there watching it, you were interacting with the people there. So what these reporter did, they were walking and they were talking to people by saying “Hey look we have around 200-300 people that are watching you right now and asking people what they wanted to say to their live viewers, and all of a sudden, the people who were watching were able to ask questions, the people who were in Ferguson were able to answer those questions. There as an exchange in ideas and it was bringing this transparency to the whole situation in a dynamic and interactive way. And that you don’t get anywhere else, period.

So, when you’re actually able to be there vicariously via live stream and be interacting with the people there, getting questions answered, forming opinions based around real-true-authentic content about things that are happening, that’s magical.

We firmly believe that you will be participating in all of the content that you are simultaneously consuming within 10 years and live streaming on a mobile device is the first way of ushering that in.

As far as the introduction of periscope and other competitors, has these new companies emergence changed your vision, or direction?

It’s certainly has not changed our vision or direction. What it has done is made us take a closer look at our company to see what our offerings are going to be and how we are differentiating ourselves. But, our vision is our vision. Our vision is this, for the past 10-11 years social media has existed in a paradigm of posting content and letting people react to it, right? The reactive model. Whether it’s on Instagram, whether it’s on Twitter, whether it’s on Facebook, on Snapchat, it really doesn’t make a difference… so we are in this reactive paradigm; like, let’s throw something over the wall and see what my “network” thinks of it. We (Periscope) knows that’s old and that it’s going to go away. What we are trying to usher in is this participatory paradigm in which the person just initiates the content, but everyone actually takes part. So instead of just going in and liking something just to kind-of show your support passively, you’re in the stream and you’re engaging with the content in real time with the person who initiated the content. So all of a sudden the content becomes the culmination of not only the person who pressed “stream”, but also the people who are watching. Because they’re asking questions, they’re affecting the behavior of the person that’s streaming. It’s an experience and a piece of content that is created from everyone that is involved, no matter what side of the phone they are on. We think that’s the future. We firmly believe that you will be participating in all of the content that you are simultaneously consuming within 10 years and live streaming on a mobile device is the first way of ushering that in. That’s our vision and it’s been our vision since the company was founded and it hasn’t changed.

How do you think social media will continue to integrate into peoples everyday lives?

I’ll say this and see if it answers your questions. When you were a kid, the idea of seeing something pretty and holding up a camera and taking a photo of it was a behavior that you learned very early on, right? Whether it was from your 4th of 5th Christmas, or your birthday on, you learned this behavior. You know why people take pictures of things, you know what it means to capture an image. Right? That’s just been part of your life, whether you’re shooting on a Nikon F2, or if you’re shooting on a little crappy flip phone. The experience, the thinking, and the mindset is the same. The same goes for writing, right? You’ve been writing since you were in Kindergarten, 4 years old, or whatever, you know what it means to communicate by text. You also know what it means to communicate by archived video, and video on demand. Because no matter what, you’ve been watching movies and you’ve had or seen a camcorder at birthdays and everything else. You know what that medium is. You’ve experienced it and you’ve created it from an early age.Live video does not fall into any of those categories. Live video is a medium that is unfamiliar to people and no one is ever in the history of the world been able to be empowered through live video, basically because the network infrastructure and the hardware hasn’t supported it. Now all of a sudden we’re walking around with internet connected cameras in our pockets, we have local network infrastructure that will stream high quality video of ourselves in real time to thousands of people at a time. We have the technology to support it, and so it’s our job to usher it in. Because this is not an experience that anyones had before. And it’s not a medium that anyones engaged with before. Whether it be in a social way or whether it be just to capture whatever it was, “a 5th birthday party back in 1978.” It’s never been around it’s never been a thing. And so it’s a unique challenge that comes along with bringing it in. However, because our technology supports it, and the technology sitting in your back pocket right now supports it, it’s our job to make it a real thing. Because it is by far the most engaging and compelling medium that exists right now on social. So we just have to think about which stories do we want to tell in order to make it meaningful for people.

So stories like Ferguson, stories like Jeb Bush talking directly to his constituents. Stories like the University of Oregon streaming their practices to their fans that can’t be there. These are all compelling ways that live video has really demonstrated some serious value for people and it’s only going to grow. And like I said before, without the participatory component, it has half the meaning it would have otherwise. Basically I believe live video is the last untapped social medium, after text, and then you have photo, then you had video on demand, that’s what’s going to carry us into the next 3 years, I guarantee you. Because nothing has been done with it yet, and at the same time every platform is moving closer and closer to real time. Look at Snapchat, they are exploding, they are absolutely cursing it. It’s because Snapchat is the most authentic and closes to real time platform that people have to communicate with, outside from twitter. And it’s much more engaging because it’s video, and it’s photo, it’s text, and it’s everything else. So, we see all these platforms moving towards real time we see people craving this authentic experience, we see people wanting to see part of people’s lives in more real way than just a Facebook post and a like or a comment. So it’s totally natural that live video is going to be the next big thing. I believe in 5 years anything that you post via social media is going to be participated in as your posting it, I promise you. Other people will be there with you as you are creating that content. It’s not going to be a, “Oh, let me post a photo and see what people think.” I promise you that’s old, that’s not going to last. It might last 5 years but it won’t last 10.

How can people get involved? How can they join in on the fun with Meerkat?

Meerkat allows you to have a voice, it allows you to tell a story and tell it with everyone who cares about you. You can either consume it or you can initiate it. If you’re interested in politics or you’re interested in sports or you’re interested in breaking news or you’re interested in cooking or you’re interested in getting educated about photoshop or you’re interested in music of any genre, there are people creating and doing all of those things right now, and you can be part of it. You can be talking with them and interacting with all of these different types of people in real-time.

Meerkat is an app that allows you to have a button on your phone, that when you press it everyone on twitter who cares about what you’re doing can immediately tune into the perspective of your phone and you can interact with them live. Right now you currently need a twitter account to use Meerkat, but we are soon moving to our own platform.