Meerkat vs Periscope – Which will win?

Meerkat and Periscope are hogging the lime light in much of the social media conversation these days. Well, at the Tech Mahindra digital team was not far behind too.

Over last few days, our team has been closely looking at both the apps and analyzing features that brands and individuals can leverage. Undoubtedly, these are early days and the apps are still less crowded. But many of the early adopters are spending their creative moments on either or both the apps.

Meerkat or Periscope?

Before we go about deciding which one is better, let us get around the basics.

To start off, both the apps are live streaming apps and so far only available on iOS devices. They are in some ways integrated with Twitter. The followers can view the streams either on the app or browser.

But Meerkat was off the ground early and it made a big splash during the SXSW couple of weeks back. The app was not backed by Twitter but it was integrated very nicely with Twitter. The user needs to have a Twitter account to sign up with.

As a Meerkat user, initially (yes, it was blocked after a while) you could see fellow Meerkat users from Twitter. But Meerkat still has a leaderboard and search option that can allow you to search and follow users.

On the other hand, few weeks after launch of Meerkat, we saw the launch of Periscope, an app backed by Twitter. Interesting it has nearly the same features as Meerkat apart for a few differences.

Being backed by Twitter, Periscope users could see their Twitter followers and follow them if they had signed up for Periscope too. In addition to that, similar to Meerkat’s Leaderboard, Periscope has ‘Most Loved’ users.

Then again, there are 2 major differences.

1. Sharing on Twitter – Comments on Meerkat get posted on the users Twitter Account too. But Periscope is independent of Twitter; which means, your conversations are contained to the video stream and all the engagement stays on Periscope only.
2. Video Archival – Video stream from Meerkat cannot be possibly seen again whereas Periscope allows saving videos for later viewing. (This is one feature we loved). The video from Periscope can also be saved to your device’s Camera Roll.

As we said, these are early days and both the apps will see some updates in few days. From the news, Meerkat recently got $14 million infusion in funds and we should see some exciting features pretty soon.

And our guess is, with the power of Twitter behind it, Periscope will not be far behind.

Just as you, we still do not have a clear winner, but the Digital team has liked Periscope more than Meerkat so far (one of the reasons being Periscope was much more stable during the last few weeks).

Do let us know your thoughts?

By: Tech Mahindra Digital marketing Team