Video is an excellent medium for advertising, especially with the added bonus of immediacy in live broadcasts. So it’s no surprise that some brands are already trying out the two breakout live-streaming apps, Meerkat and Periscope.
Meerkat is the success story out of this year’s SXSW festival. After its debut on the website Product Hunt in early March, the live-streaming app quickly found popularity on Twitter, reportedly amassing over 500,000 users.
Not to be outdone, Twitter first cut off its support for Meerkat integration and launched its own live-streaming app Periscope last week, which built on Meerkat’s SXSW buzz to quickly surpass it in popularity, as shown in the chart above, detailing tweets with links to each service in the past week.
Many expect Periscope to win over Meerkat, given its affiliation with Twitter. But this chart seems to indicate that it is not a zero-sum game. After the initial spike subsided, Periscope has fallen back to around the same level as Meerkat, albeit logging a few thousand more tweets per day than Meerkat consistently. Periscope may be winning at this point, but if Meerkat can find a way to leverage its ties with Hollywood celebrities and not let Twitter won them over, it might just still have a shot at this live-streaming duel.