Periscope - Explore the world through someone else's eyes

@Kayvz @benrbn Damn Ben makes it hard to not be rooting for Meerkat

@benrbn Gracious responses to both the "little guy" who was working on a competitor and gave it up, and THE direct competitor with all the backing in the world. Impressive.

@Kayvz @benrbn Come on, Ben, you need to be a bit less likeable.

@Kayvz @benrbn Thanks man. Let's get together! It's tempting to dogfood and meet over Meerscope, but I say we do it the old fashioned way :) By the way, one of the most serendipitous things that I find fascinating is how both of our metaphors (the Meerkat & the Periscope) share the same characteristic of peering up/down/side-to-side. Feels like telepathy, or as you call it, "spontaneous togetherness" that we share such a similar metaphor. <3

@Kayvz agreed! :-) pinging you now we should def grab breakfast!

@benln oh boy

I wonder if anyone will Periscope the Meerkat team meerkating its funding announcement.

@benln one can only hope. At least with Periscope you can watch it if you miss it.

@benln @paulprins $14m at a 40m valuation from Greylock (dont quote me) but ya time to pivot boys! Meerkat Roulette

@benln lol, ubermeta

@bramk hahaha!

@bramk ha, awesome.

@_jacksmith distribution...

@_jacksmith "Unlike Meerkat, Periscope can save streams so that you can replay them later. It turns out to be Periscope’s killer feature — and the main reason that it’s likely to become my live-streaming platform of choice." - http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/2... Although there is #katch on Meerkat now.

@_jacksmith the major advantage is that you can run Periscope on iOS 7.1, which means that people who have an iPhone 4 or that have decided to stay on iOS 7.1 can use the app. The main difference between the two apps will be the community they manage to build.

@_jacksmith @pierrickgt Definitely agree it all comes down to the community! Note: if anyone is on iOS 7.1 still, they should upgrade.

@_jacksmith Maybe for users - having a chance to rise to the top? (I haven't downloaded it yet.) But I did find that not being a "day 1, first 5 hours adopter of Meerkat" sunk my ability to rise on the platform. Also, I need more friends.... :/

@bentossell yep, Twitter integration will be live around 7am PST (the original time of our launch). Looks like our app store link was discovered quite a few hours earlier than we would have hoped, hence the delay there :) sorry about that!

@kayvz Hi, Kayvon. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about how you and your team is handling the media attention focused on Periscope. It's a very unique situation. Not many apps launch to such buzz and a manufactured horse-race against a close competitor (I don't believe this is a winner take all scenario). Do you guys talk about Meerkat internally? Embrace the media attention? Block it all out? Is it exciting or scary? How do you keep your team focused and productive with all this going on?

@kayvz will you at some point be able to schedule broadcasts on periscope? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is people have never even seen a live stream because they click a dead link.. (Different since periscope records) I've found its nice to be able to alert followers prior to so they can join.

@eric3000 Hey Eric, I appreciate the question. The situation has felt really bizarre. Our preference would have been to stay heads down and under the radar until we launched. We'd rather have our product speak for itself. Having the acquisition be public for even a couple weeks just builds unintended hype and anticipation, which leads to all kinds of judgement, distraction and expectation. It's really weird working on something for a year, and then having people judge it without you having really been ready to share it yet. But given how much media attention Twitter gets generally, it was unavoidable for the press to write about rumors once news of the deal leaked. All that being said, we really just tried to zone it out as much as possible and remind ourselves that we've been working hard on something for awhile, and that we owed it to ourselves to focus for the home stretch without getting caught up in the juicy dialogue in the media.

@brockneilson Hey Brock. Early on in our development we actually had a notion of "scheduled broadcasts". Our theory was that scheduling something in advance 1) solves the "empty state" problem where users could at least see upcoming content even if nothing was live right now and 2) you could build an audience and try and solve for the "nobody is around to watch my broadcast because they didn't have a heads up" problem. So this existed in Periscope for awhile, but we ultimately decided to take it out for a few reasons: 1) We found that the # of subscribers to an upcoming broadcasts didn't really drive actual viewership of that broadcast, as compared to the # of viewers that would join spontaneously. 2) Simplicity. One less flow to worry about (choosing an upcoming date, subscriber UI, etc) We certainly may revisit this decision later, especially since our #1 observation could have just been a function of a small sample size (beta!). But I'd say we're even more comfortable with our v1 approach because we found Replays, as a feature, to be a really helpful part of solving the "dead link" problem.

Good point, I wonder the same about @onair which is near and dear to me. Then again, it's in the best interest of the consumer to have multiple options.

@nicolasegosum I kind of disagree with you on that. You saw FB try and knock out Snapchat and Yo last year, Google tries to knock out growing start ups all the time and misses the target. Google Plus? [fart noise]. I think now more than ever startups are able to grow and react quicker than big companies and win over users. IP protection on apps is NOT the answer. Not sure anything could kill the app world quicker than allowing that.

@nicolasegosum This shows how important it is to build a great product that can stand on its own - don't build a feature build a product :D

@nicolasegosum @kristofertm I don't think that FB tried to knock out Snapchat or Yo - hard to do when there is so much momentum going for them. The big guys - FB, Google, etc., are playing the long game while the smaller guys - Meerkat, etc., are playing the sprint. You have to ask yourself who has the ability to stick around longer - to essentially outrun the rest. Will it be Meerkat's $12M + 400K users that relies mostly on Twitter for awareness or Twitter's Periscope that doesn't have to "earn" but has an "available" audience in the 100's of millions (plus deeper pockets). Sometimes the tech that should win doesn't because it can't keep up the pace.

@nicolasegosum @morewillie just had a debate about this - dont rely on a giants services; they can come in and shut you down anytime.

@irvingtorresyc yeah! Today I played with Periscope and became a "MOST LOVED" user. My learnings: -People start watching from recent periscopes, and keep watching if it's good. That's the only way to get 20+ people to watch you. -Walks: I walked to lunch, kept the camera focus to what I was doing and people were like: "This is real". They told me to put more & more pepper. And I did :) -Unexpected stuff: I was offering my ice cream to random people on campus. Everyone was happy. -Strong following on Twitter helps a lot! I don't have it, but the MOST LOVED list is full of them. -Meta stuff works as usual: Periscope inside Periscope. -Cats! (big surprise) Hope it helps you guys!

@irvingtorresyc don't think they had a choice!

@appmeerkat @stevesi Same here, played around with it and the recording of it all makes me a bit more careful. Has a different feel to it after a stream when you see it being saved.

@appmeerkat @stevesi I was upset when I would have to miss out on live streams on Meerkat because I am in the middle of a meeting or am not on a WiFi network. It's nice to not have that pressure as a viewer to basically drop everything and watch the stream. Glad to see the save feature showing up.

@appmeerkat @joedandachli That FOMO is both the benefit and the challenge. That's why I like scheduled live. I wonder if recorded streams will wind up being scripted and rehearsed sort of like reality tv?

@appmeerkat @joedandachli @stevesi I'm looking forward to the Saturday Night Live of mobile streaming. In the 70's, Lorne Michaels and the SNL crew created a broadcast phenomenon for the first generation who grew up on TV. The core audience was young adults. The first generation who grew up on the Internet is just now maturing, and is similarly of the young adult demographic. We're about to witness a content explosion on this new medium that hasn't been seen since YouTube first came out, and possibly even since widespread adoption of the television.

@oisinzimmermann you can also broadcast private videos with select friends and delete public broadcasts right afterward. Re: #2, live video streaming on mobile is not a winner takes all. It's an entire category with room for different experiences and types of people. I'm curious to see how Meerkat and Periscope converge or diverge over time.

@oisinzimmermann @rrhoover completely agree w/ #2. I think @benrbn and the Meerkat team will differentiate themselves enough for there to be multiple players in the livestream category. Nice to see this:

@rrhoover I really like the private broadcast feature (which is similar to @onair) and so both companies have similar capability. Interface/UI matters but in the end the deciding factor will be content, and how it's discovered. That will define who uses each service and for what. Right now @appmeerkat have the edge with cool people like @jimmyfallon and a whole host of celebrities/journalists trying it out with widespread publicity. But @persicopeco have a better discovery platform, and could easily supersede @appmeerkeat in the celebrity department, particularly as the stream is auto saved, which brands/celebrities will want. Obviously twitter integration is key here too. I'm very interested to see how this develops!

I have a lot of respect for @benrbn's humility and thoughtfulness. It really shines through in the podcast we recorded a few weeks ago.

@oisinzimmermann @rrhoover Agreed. The assumption that @appmeerkat is dead because of Periscope is probably a bad one. It's going to be tough, for sure. But there are some parallels with Instagram re: distribution and the network. Instagram used the Twitter graph to grow, and so there was a lot of fear after Twitter stopped showing their images in-stream. Ultimately, Instagram succeeded because it turned into its own network and achieved success because of it. Meerkat and Instagram both have a heavy reliance on other people's networks (OPN) for growth But sounds like @benrbn is trying to get Meerkat to the same place as Instagram now -- its own network and social graph, spawned through the Twitter graph but sustained through internal engagement. PS - Kik launched and had initial growth through a similar OPN model before BlackBerry cut them off. But the growth and engagement hasn't slowed.

@alexkess Before you start a broadcast on Periscope, you can turn on/off Twitter sharing. Right now (and for the next 3 hours), this feature is disabled because we weren't planning on launching until 7am PST (we were caught off guard by some savvy folks who found the link early in the App Store!). It'll be enabled in a few hours, we promise!

@kayvz all makes sense now. Thanks for clearing that up!