I’ve tested both apps over the past few days and have made the following observations:
- Both apps are great for scheduled events where you can tell people in advance that you want to live stream something
- They can of course be extremely good for breaking news too, but the user obviously has to be ready to jump on a notification quickly before the feed has finished streaming. On Periscope you can watch it again afterwards if you missed it live, but on Meerkat you will have missed the moment and can’t watch it again
- If you want to have the camera in a good fixed position it then makes it hard for you to interact with the app or add comments of your own. In fact you can’t really interact with the comments unless you have an external keyboard because otherwise it will become shaky
- It seems to be that Meerkat offers more interaction with viewers by allowing the host account to send comments of their own. Periscope didn’t seem to have this function. Periscope, however, has several other features that Meerkat was lacking
- When I was experimenting with live streams I found that I received a lot of ‘hearts’ or new viewers initially because I must have popped up on their timelines. After the first couple of minutes, however, you might not get many new viewers joining after that initial launch unless you push the stream via Twitter
If you discover any other features that are worth highlighting or disagree with any of our findings then please do comment below.
