10 years ago this week mobile live streaming launched to the masses

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending March 21, 2015.

Ten years ago this week, everyone was talking about the new mobile live streaming apps Periscope and Meerkat.

Meerkat launched in February 2015. Periscope was founded in 2014, and was acquired by Twitter before its public launch in March of that year.

The apps made it incredibly easy to go live. You didn't need to have a fancy camera or understand live streaming settings. All you needed to do was launch the app and tap a couple of buttons.

People started really buzzing about the apps during the SXSW festival, which was 10 years ago this week. 

Why? Twitter tried to kill Meerkat. 

OK, maybe kill is too strong a word.

But part of what got people talking was that Twitter cut Meerkat off from their social graph. When Meerkat launched, their rules said "Everything that happens on meerkat happens on Twitter. Streams will be pushed to followers in real time." By cutting off the Twitter social graph, Meerkat streamers' followers wouldn't be notified when a new livestream started.

Periscope hadn't publicly launched when Twitter made this change. But they did confirm they had acquired Periscope, and a week later Twitter officially launched the app.

In 2015 live streaming was all the rage

In my 2015 roundup, I noted that it wasn't just Meerkat and Periscope that launched. 

2015 was the year that live streaming - particularly mobile live streaming - came to the masses. A number of mobile apps were introduced that allow live streaming with just a few taps - Meerkat, Periscope, Wirecast, InstaLively, even Facebook is getting into the act. And on desktop Twitch.tv expanded beyond gaming and Blab let you stream your conversations.

Notably Facebook and YouTube were much slower to launch their own live streaming options. 

Facebook launched live streaming, just for public figures, in August 2015, and then opened it up to everyone in early 2016.

YouTube took even longer to launch mobile live streaming. At the time YouTube's only "easy" live streaming option was a Hangout on Air, which tied you to your desktop computer. 

Later in 2015, it was possible to live stream from your phone using the YouTube Gaming app, but that limited you to streaming a game or other app with a selfie cam overlay.

The YouTube mobile app didn't get live streaming until 2016, and that only very slowly rolled out to creators. In 2017 you needed 10,000 subscribers, 2019 you needed 1000 subscribers. Finally, at the end of 2021, YouTube reduced the requirement to only 50 subscribers (which is the requirement today).

Why was it so slow? While there may have been technical limitations, much of the caution was likely for safety and policy reasons. It’s really difficult to moderate live content, especially when people can live stream from anywhere, doing anything. 

The view from 2025

Meerkat only lasted until the fall of 2016, when they pivoted to Houseparty, a video chat app. That was eventually acquired by Epic Games and shut down in 2021.

Twitter kept Periscope running, but usage declined. In December 2020 they announced that it would be shut down.

The truth is that the Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen declining usage and know that the cost to support the app will only continue to go up over time.

Most of Periscope's features were integrated into Twitter live streaming.
 
It’s become pretty clear that live streaming by itself is hard to sustain a platform. There are discovery issues, which is difficult when you have to be on the platform at just the right time. And people don’t rewatch a lot of live streams.

When Blab shut down in 2016, CEO Shaan Puri wrote: 

The struggle with Livestreaming — is that we need to show you something awesome, that’s being made right now.

Turns out, that’s really tough. It killed Meerkat, and Periscope & FB Live are feeling the pain right now. Really, only Twitch has gotten it right with live streaming video games.

In live streaming, the churn is real.

We hoped replays would help, but less than 10% of all watch time was on replays. Why? Because the off-the-cuff, unpredictable nature of livestreams make for terrible replays. The better the live stream was, the worse the replay will be. 

Live streaming has survived as part of a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook, or like on YouTube or TikTok where there are plenty of other videos to watch on demand.

And it feels like vertical mobile live streams have gotten more popular in recent years to go along with more casual vertical TikToks, Reels and Shorts. YouTube even has a new(ish) vertical live feed you can access in the mobile Shorts feed.

But the real boom is live shopping. Maybe a decade from now we'll be doing all our shopping live.

References

Venture Beat, 13 March 2015: Twitter cripples Meerkat by cutting off access to its social graph

Venture Beat, 13 March 2015: Twitter confirms its acquisition of live video app Periscope

The Verge, 17 March 2015: How Meerkat conquered all at SXSW

Periscope blog, 26 March 2015: Up Periscope.

PC Mag, 3 October 2016: Streaming app Meerkat is officially dead

Periscope blog, 15 December 2020: Farewell, Periscope

Stock video clip of person holding mobile phone: ninosouza on Pixabay