Periscope review: does Twitter's live-streaming service beat Meerkat?

It’s fair to say that Periscope, Twitter’s live-streaming video app, is late to the game. Not just the three-weeks-and-counting between its launch and that of tech press darling Meerkat, but the two and a half years between it and YouNow, which has grown to 100m user sessions every month by offering performers a share of the revenue.

So does Periscope have what it takes to seize the lead in an already crowded marketplace?

When it comes to the app itself, it’s fair to say that Periscope makes Meerkat look like a tech demo. Even in the beta version I’ve been using for the past week, the app has a level of polish which speaks to its year-long development time, with every swipe and tap feeling like it’s been carefully thought out.

That lead extends to the hard tech of the video streaming, as well. Using both Periscope and Meerkat side by side, it’s clear that the lag on the former is around a third that of the current leader. If you’re just passively watching a stream, that might not matter too much, but both apps trumpet the interactivity of live streams, with users ideally influencing the streamer themselves. If that’s the case, cutting a 30-second delay down to 10 seconds or less is the difference between being able to have a conversation and not.

Not live streaming but ‘teleporting’

Keyvon Beykpour, Periscope’s co-founder, tells a story of the moment the app clicked for him. “I think that the reason we care a lot about the lag is that we’ve realised, and I hope that our users have that aha moment, that the magic moment is when you say something that ends up affecting the experience.

“Watching my buddy streaming from the Karaoke bar … I said I dare you to go onstage, and he did. I made that happen.”

Beykpour doesn’t describe Periscope as a live streaming app. “We think we’re building a teleportation product,” he says.

But not every comparison between Periscope and Meerkat is fair. In some places, the app has zigged where its competitor has zagged.

That’s no clearer than when you finish a live session, and Periscope pops up a screen which says “preparing for replay”. There’s no ephemerality here (at least, not by default). When a stream is over, it can be rewatched by viewers who missed their chance first time around, and everything – the comments, hearts, and new-viewer notifications – plays out as-live.

Replaying live streams

“We didn’t want you to miss the experience, we thought it was special because it was live,” explains Beykpour. “I still believe that, but we want to balance that with practicality. The synchronicity problem” – ensuring that viewers are available at the same time the streamer is – “is hard. There just is a significant drop-off with that problem.

“The true test for us has been does it decrease the percentage of people who watch live, and the answer I think is no. If you’re watching live, given how low latency the product is, you can change what’s happening.”

But one reason why Meerkat has no replay function is to make sure that people who have never streamed themselves before feel comfortable giving it a go. “To do that we wanted to make sure that you feel like you control the content,” said Meerkat founder Ben Rubin at this year’s South by South West festival. “If we want you to go a little bit outside your comfort zone, we want to make sure that you control the content. We want to make sure that people feel comfortable to stream their grandson’s soccer game on a Sunday afternoon.”

Private broadcasts

Periscope has its own answers to that problem. The app enables private broadcasts, which let anyone lock off a broadcast to just a selected few followers – perfect for the family game of football. And then, to entice more public streams, it adopts its own mechanic, letting users give each other “hearts” for good streams.

It’s barely any different from a Facebook “like” or a Twitter “fav”, with the exception that you can give more than one for a single stream, but it’s still a nice motivator. Walking New York’s High Line park on a bitterly cold Sunday morning was rewarded with 25 hearts, a reminder that, even in beta, people were watching and appreciating.

Periscope also takes a subtler approach to community-building. If you use Twitter, it’s been hard not to notice Meerkat, because of its strong hooks into the service. A new stream is automatically announced on Twitter; comments and replies are shared on Twitter as @-replies; and new users are made to automatically follow Meerkat’s own Twitter account, @appmeerkat.

By contrast, Periscope is content to live as its own network. That’s partially because the app makes strong use of push notifications to encourage you to watch friend’s live broadcasts, although Beykpour says that “we want to be good push notification citizens”, and the app has a plethora of options for controlling that (including a first-of-its-kind ability to mute the app temporarily from within a notification, which the founder thinks is likely to set a trend).

Periscope has the advantages of Twitter’s social graph

Unlike Meerkat, Periscope still has access to Twitter’s social graph, which lets users easily find people they follow on the social network and refollow them on Periscope. After Meerkat was cut off from that information by Twitter, due to the company’s upcoming release of Periscope, it was paradoxically required to put more of its content on the network itself, in order to let users find each other.

Ultimately, both apps still have to answer the largest question, which is whether and how video streaming will become an everyday occurrence. Periscope is betting on private broadcasts leading to a bustling community to draw people out of their shells, while Meerkat hopes that people will give it a go out of curiosity, and carry on from there. I’m not entirely convinced – but maybe I’m just shy?

If you’re bitten by the bug, though, it’s clear that Periscope is the better app for the job. With more customisability, drastically lower lag-time and a sleek finish, it’s got everything to recommend it over the incumbent.