MEERKAT
2015 — 2016
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Here lies Meerkat, the app that turned SXSW 2015 into a live-streaming gold rush. For about seventy-two hours, every tech journalist in Austin pointed a phone at their own face and declared the future of broadcasting had arrived.
The future, it turned out, had a landlord. Twitter — which had quietly acquired a competing app called Periscope months earlier — cut off Meerkat’s access to its social graph the day before the conference even ended. Periscope launched soon after, baked directly into Twitter, and Meerkat was left live-streaming to an audience of zero.
The team pivoted to a video-chat app called Houseparty, which actually found success years later. But the Meerkat name, the one that briefly made “going live” a verb, was quietly buried — a category-defining product that lost its category before it could capitalize on it.
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“We didn’t lose to a better product. We lost to a Twitter API call that took about four seconds to execute.”
— Meerkat Co-Founder, 2015
38.0K souls have paid their respects.