Periscope vs. Meerkat

Periscope vs Meerkat

For a few weeks now, Meerkat has been the most talked about new app. Meerkat is a live video streaming service that let’s the world see what you see with just a couple of taps. Twitter however launched periscope just a few days ago to prevent Meerkat tap into its users. This set the backdrop for a battle, a live video streaming battle. The contenders being periscope developed by twitter itself and Meerkat developed by Life on Air Inc.

To start with, the video is known as Meerkast on Meerkat. To begin a Meerkast, all you need to do is fill in a subject box describing what you want to show and hit stream. It’s that simple. When you hit stream, all your followers receive an alert saying that you are live.
They can watch and send you messages which pop up at the bottom of the screen which is really impressive. You also get to see the number of people watching the stream. You can also save the video onto your phone. Once the streaming has ended, there is no way of retrieving it. In other words, people who arrived late can’t watch the video. This can be quite frustrating at times. Users can retweet any stream to their followers.

Talking about the cons, a big drawback is that you can shoot the videos only in portrait mode. But this doesn’t seem to deter users from using it.

Periscope works in a similar way. But twitter made a significant difference by allowing users to publish their videos so that followers can view them later too. This certainly gives Periscope an edge over Meerkat as this lets your video reach out to more people.

Another crucial difference is that periscope is faster than meerkat, in other words, there is less delay between the viewer and the broadcaster. Followers can also send hearts to the stream. Periscope keeps track of the number of hearts the stream receives and more the number, higher you get in the “Most loved” list.