Twitter has been trying to kill Meerkat in the womb due to the fact that it has been working on its own live-streaming app known as Periscope that will directly compete with Meerkat. Obviously that didn’t work and now Twitter has been forced to release Periscope early. So now that both of them have been released, how do they compare to each other? The folks down at Re/code have spent the past couple of days trying to decide.
Are you a Periscope or a Meerkat? A month ago, that question didn’t make any sense, but boy what a difference a month can make. On Thursday, Twitter launched Periscope , its standalone live-streaming app, to rival the incumbent industry leader: four-week-old Meerkat, a similar app that took off at the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. In many ways, the two apps operate the same. Users can stream live video and audio from their smartphones and share a link to the broadcast on Twitter. People can follow along to watch the stream, comment on what’s happening, and pass the link along to others in order to build an audience. The differences, though, subtle as they might be, are what will likely set the two apps apart as users choose one camp over the other. We’ve spent a few days comparing the two, and there are things you should know about each.