Daily Management Review

What's a Meerkat?


03/26/2015


Meerkat application service which allows keeping track of live video broadcast, has become the trend of the month. The project has started a couple of weeks ago, but has already managed to acquire an impressive base of users, some of whom are very famous person.



Meerkat raised $ 12 million investment in the Series B round from Greylock Partners and several investors. The main investor became Greylock, reported TechCrunch citing informed sources, noting that the capitalization of start-up after this round could be worth $ 52 million. Business Insider outlined Meerkat estimated market valuation slightly lower, calling the figure of $ 40 million. In January of this year, Meerkat (Life on Air Inc) has already raised $ 3.5 million of investments.

The app is strongly tied to Twitter, which, by the way, plans to launch a similar service called Periscope. The very idea of ​​live video streaming is not new. Some applications provide a functional, but not particularly popular use. But Meerkat launch just came at the most favorable time for streaming video.
For example, in the US, 50% of iPhone owners and 46% of others said they watch video at least once a month, according to a January survey by comScore. In 2009, the ratio was 23% of Apple and 15% of other users.

Changes are obvious: smart phones have become faster and more powerful, with large screens that can play video in high definition. Cell networks have become smart enough to provide access to the network for reasonable money. Services and sites have become more focused on mobile users, providing a user-friendly interface and optimization for smartphones and tablets.

In the popularization of video, we should pay tribute to such services like YouTube, Twitter, and more recently, Facebook, which at the recent announcement of quarterly financial result reported that users of social networks watch 3 billion videos a day, while 65% of them do it via mobile devices.

Advertisers, in turn, realized that the video is a convenient and promising format, suitable not only for television. Analysts are predicting solid growth to video advertising, and Facebook and other big players are already fidgeting in anticipation of the upcoming earnings.

As a result, the time users spend on video, also increased. In the IV quarter of last year, an average American spent 102 minutes per month for watching a video through mobile, according to research by Nielsen. The annual growth rate is 20%. Of course, the TV is still in the priority: average US citizen spends watching TV 149 hours per month. Well, online video has room to grow.

Meerkat managed to accumulate an impressive audience of 300 thousand users. The app allows iPhone users broadcasting live video to their subscribers in Twitter. With the start of the broadcast, followers on Twitter are getting a notification that provides access to the translation.

Many well-known public figures have started to use the service. US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker broadcast through Meerkat in his Twitter account the oath of the new the US Patent and Trademark chief Michelle Lee. Notable users Twitter, such as Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Fallon, also assessed the application.