Periscope, Meerkat or Google Hangout - who wins the Live Streaming race?

A new battleline has been drawn on the Mobile Social arena - that of Mobile streaming. New players have jumped into it. Google already had an app in this area. Where does this Live streaming lead to? A quick take on Mobile Live Streaming and the players.

What is this Mobile Live streaming all about?

This is a natural continuation of the current Social Apps. The existing SM biggies were mostly text driven to start with (FB, Twitter, G+). Then the platforms moved towards photos (Instagram, Snapchat). Typing an event (live-tweet) used to be quite a cool concept till some time back. But as you can imagine and might have experienced, it takes a lot of effort (to type, take snaps etc) to do a live-tweet event. Also it doesn't give an experience quite close to the live event. Those who have followed any event via live-tweet may appreciate this. So what is the next alternative? Stream it live!

Meerkat vs. Periscope

Meerkat is considered to be first off the mark in this Mobile Live streaming stuff. They started with Twitter integration, but had to take a different strategy, after apparently Twitter decided to acquire and launch Periscope (Meerkat's version of the story is here on Techcrunch). If you want a deep lowdown on how to use either of them, you can have a look at this post [15th April, 2015] which shows steps screen by screen on both the platforms. And if you are looking for a comparison of the two platforms, you can check this page from telegraph.co.uk. Overall, the differences are quite less with the basic concepts remaining same - the differences are at UX like allowing to save a broadcast for future or showing a leaderboard etc. 

Was there any app available for Live Stream earlier?

Yes. Google Hangout was the leader in that segment. Over time, it has added whole lot of features in its App. But the catch is - Google has put more effort on its web version, compared to the mobile version. A possible reason (just my guess) can be - Google kept Skype in mind as its primary competition and built Hangout around that. While Hangout has grown beyond that possible initial brief, it remains primarily focused as a chatting / discussion forum app, instead of a live streaming app. Technically there is not much challenge in using hangout as a live stream app, but somehow the branding has not been done that way. The mental association of Hangout is still with a group chat due to its branding strategy. For example, you might not have seen much of Google Hangout being used to livecast a cricket match (or baseball match for that matter), though there doesn't seem to be any reason on why it can't be used that way either. Also Google has stabilized the product to a large extent over the years. Having said that, we wonder whether Google failed to market its product, again. Or did Google miss the bus to associate its product with this new segment of market? 

Mobile platform affinity

Periscope has chosen to stick to iPhone platform as its choice so far, while Meerkat has moved fast to come out with its Android version in early May. That puts some obvious pressure on Periscope to come out with the Android version. On the other hand, Google has released its Hangout on iPhone platform also (apart from its obvious choice of Android).

Business Model

So far, Live streaming has been free, like all other SM platforms. While Twitter might have spent millions to buy Periscope, the revenue generation model may become contextual ad in future. Recently in the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao bout, apparently Periscope had more viewers than HBO as tv viewers were holding their mobile device infront of the TV and streaming them live on Periscope. Is that illegal and infringing copyright? Well, that's another debate. Most of the new technologies have run-in with the existing laws and rules, but the point here is - would the Live streaming app get into a model where it replaces television by providing live footage from important events? Not sure. Frankly the revenue generation model is still not clear to me.

Who would win this race of Live Streaming?

That's the obvious question that may come to anyone's mind. Lets check the variables.
1) App features: Periscope seems to be having better of it right now. But the feature difference is quite thin. Any one of this three can beat the other two on feature richness in a matter of 3 months if their product managers buckle up tight.

2) Platform connectivity: While both Periscope and Meerkat started with Twitter and Hangout obviously with Google+, it would require to naturally connect to multiple platforms, sply Facebook to make them more popular. Can Google do that?

3) Backend support: Video streaming would require a lot of bandwidth and server readiness. Google, having spent some time on Hangout, is far better placed on this. The experience on Meerkat Android in India is quite bad so far, which may be due to non-availability of nearby servers (my guess). Google would win this part of the competition all the way if they really want to compete in this market with its millions of servers spread over the world.

Bottomline:

Some of the tech journos have already decided that there can be only one winner in this space. But so far, the experience doesn't say so. You have so many platforms in SM space (FB, G+, Twitter and so on). In Messenger space also, you have quite a few (Whatsapp, Viber, Hike etc). Why can't there be many platforms in this space in that case? 

The Live streaming space is hotting up and is going to be of immense interest soon. Don't get surprised if you suddenly see Google waking up and making Hangout a little more jazzy to compete with Meerkat and Periscopes. Or for that matter, who knows if Facebook wants to get into this space either. Watch this space for more fun. Till then, good bye and happy streaming.