Meerkat Is Ditching the Livestream — And Chasing a Video Social Network Instead
Two weeks ago, Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin sent an email to his company's 48 investors laying bare an observation that he'd made peace with months earlier: Meerkat, the livestreaming app that played the role …
Context & Ripple Effects
Meerkat was the breakout side project of SXSW 2015, but within weeks Twitter cut off its access to the social graph — the friend list that made one-tap broadcasting work — while Periscope, Twitter's own app, took the spotlight. By April 2015, Meerkat's usage had already slid against Periscope, compounded by weak stream recommendations and losing its App Store featuring.
The pivot Rubin emailed his 48 investors about is less a new idea than an admission: rather than fight Twitter and Periscope for live broadcasting, Meerkat will chase a video social network instead — a category adjacent to the group video chat app Houseparty it had already stealth-launched in February. The arc ends months later with Life On Air pulling the Meerkat app from the App Store entirely to focus on Houseparty.
First-order effects
- Meerkat exits the live-broadcasting race it helped start, leaving Twitter's Periscope as the default consumer livestreaming app and freeing Ben Rubin's team to build the video social network full-time.
- The company's 48 investors are being asked to underwrite a second product bet inside the same company, after the original thesis — broadcast to your Twitter followers — was invalidated when Twitter revoked Meerkat's access to its social graph.
Second-order effects
- Periscope no longer has an independent rival pushing it on discovery and ease of use, reducing pressure on Twitter to improve livestreaming recommendations — the exact weakness that eroded Meerkat's own usage.
- Houseparty gets the resources and attention that livestreaming was consuming, positioning group video chat as the company's actual growth vehicle ahead of the eventual app shutdown.
Third-order effects
- The episode hardens the lesson that consumer apps built on another platform's social graph can be cut off overnight, pushing founders toward either owning their graph or building in formats the incumbent doesn't yet treat as core.
- If the pattern holds, single-feature viral apps increasingly survive by pivoting to adjacent social formats rather than competing head-on with platform owners — a structural shift in how independent social products get funded and judged.
The trend: Consumer live video is consolidating around platforms that own the social graph, forcing independent pioneers like Meerkat to pivot into adjacent formats such as group video chat.