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How Meerkat conquered all at SXSW

How Meerkat conquered all at SXSW

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It's 2007 all over again

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It’s been a long time since the app world saw a breakout hit rise out of SXSW. Twitter blew up here in 2007, and Foursquare replicated the feat two years later. It’s only natural that mobile social networks would get their start at SXSW: half a decade ago, the annual music and culture festival was one of the few places you could find a large concentration of smartphone owners. Then the rest of the world bought smartphones, and SXSW lost its status as a unique testing ground. Developers kept trying to launch here — 2011 brought us a bunch of flash-in-the-pan messaging apps; in 2012, "people discovery" apps like Highlight landed with a thud. It looked like an app might never break out at SXSW again. And then: Meerkat.

The live-streaming app built from the ashes of a stagnant app named Yevvo took Austin by storm this year. Festival-goers used it to stream concerts, panels, pedicab rides, and strolls down Cesar Chavez Street. While attending the live taping of a podcast, I noticed the man sitting in front of me Meerkatting the first few minutes. The previous day, some Verge friends and I shot a three-way Meerkat of us Meerkatting each other. (It was self-indulgent, terrible, and watched by more than 100 people.)

Everywhere you go in Austin, people are on Meerkat

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in town to promote the upcoming season of Veep, shot a few Meerkats during her time here. Back in New York, TV weatherman Al Roker started Meerkatting as well. By the time Jimmy Fallon announced he would Meerkat St. Patrick’s Day today, it seemed clear: the app has gone viral nationwide, with patient zero strolling through SXSW.

"The first day, I had to just pretend I knew what it was," a woman in town for the film portion of the festival confided to me at a dinner last night. "Then I went back to my hotel and was Googling it." She was impressed. A few days later, she spoke on a panel and brought up Meerkat. "I was like, it’s the future of journalism," she said, laughing.

Of course, you couldn’t truly say Meerkat had broken out unless someone were declaring it the end of civilization. Enter VentureBeat. "Just when you think you’ve discovered every awful aspect of humanity, along comes a new and innovative way to despise people you barely even know," Chris O’Brien wrote. "Meerkat is that thing." If you want to know what success looks like to a startup founder, it’s when a reporter writes something like this, also from the article: "At some point over the weekend, I realized that the apocalypse cannot come fast enough."

"The apocalypse cannot come fast enough."

Meerkat founder Ben Rubin and some of his employees attended the festival, shrugging off the haters in their bright yellow shirts. I bumped into an elated James Currier, an investor in and adviser to Meerkat, who had encouraged Rubin to experiment with different apps once Yevvo began to stall. Currier told me he believes that there will be "four or five" multibillion-dollar live-streaming companies. Meerkat, which has just 11 employees, is now beginning the dull, but important work of "operationalizing" — hiring a larger team, building an Android version, and transforming as quickly as it can from an experiment to a real company. (It also appeared to be raising money from the many venture capitalists in attendance.)

So why did Meerkat become the talk of SXSW? It likely helped when Twitter cut Meerkat off from its social graph. The move came across defensive and somewhat petty, particularly in light of Twitter’s belated announcement it had acquired Periscope, a similar live-streaming app that is currently in private beta. The move made Meerkat look like a scrappy underdog; it also lent the app a hint of edginess: The Live-Streaming Service Twitter Doesn’t Want You To Use!

Broadly speaking, we seem to be more comfortable with live-streaming ourselves than we were when, say, Justin.tv launched. Give credit to Snapchat, which has made it fun and easy to share short video clips of your world. (Instagram has also probably contributed to this.) And give credit to Meerkat’s sheer speed at getting you up and streaming:

None of which to say is that Meerkat’s long-term prospects are guaranteed. Twitter was able to hang on to the users it acquired in SXSW; Foursquare was less successful. Many apps simply turn out to be fads. But for now at least, Meerkat has captured the media’s attention. It’s a little bit silly, a lot narcissistic, and — at least until Periscope launches — truly novel. And — I’ll be damned — it broke out at SXSW. In 2015. Whatever happens to you in the future, Meerkat, we’ll always have Austin.