Live Video and Teleportation: The Snapchat Story

Over the past couple weeks, VCs and analysts have been lauding the immersive and teleportive nature of Meerkat’s live streaming. While I don’t disagree with their analyses, I find their reactions fascinating, as they are repeating almost the exact things that students have been saying about Snapchat, and specifically it’s ‘Our Stories’ product, for a while.

This disconnect shouldn’t be surprising. In-depth analysis of Snapchat is consistently sparse, most likely due to the demographic gap between its most avid users and the thought leaders of technology. But this one-sided, echo chamber is a disservice to anyone interested the future of technology, as it is simply not possible to have a conversation about Meerkat and live video without truly understanding Snapchat and its product philosophies.

Our Stories

A Snapchat ‘Our Story’ is a curated collection of photos and videos from a specific event or location. These Stories crowdsource exclusive footage, such as video clips from inside college sports locker rooms, and package the content into an immersive, snackable form .

The metrics since launch have been flooring. In January, a video that was posted in the ‘Snowpocalypse’ Our Story racked up almost 25 million views in the 24-hours it was live. To put it in context, that’s around 10 million more than The Walking Dead’s latest season finale and only 10 million less than this year’s Oscars.

Snapchat & Meerkat

While there are some strong parallels between Snapchat and Meerkat, there are fundamental differences in the products that need to be grasped before trying to predict how things will play out.

Curation

In line with its newfound position as a media company, Snapchat has quietly and carefully bet its future on curated content. Our Stories usually range from only 3-5 minutes and are carefully curated - not only to filter out inappropriate content, but also to craft concise, compelling narratives. The parts of Snapchat that won’t be monetized (individual snaps and Stories to friends) remain unfiltered, but the company is being careful about any content that they will eventually advertise on (including both Our Stories and Discover, for now).

Meerkat, on the other hand, is centered around the raw, real-time, unfiltered experience. Part of the draw of the app is that anything can happen at any moment, and, if you don’t tune in or keep watching, you might miss it. While the platform may eventually curate in the form of recommendations, once you are watching a stream, Meerkat loses its ability to filter what happens.

Distribution

The effect that curation, or lack thereof, has on content distribution cannot be overstated. While Meerkat’s platform can enable one stream to go viral in a very powerful way, unless I have some sort of following on the platform or have a strong social presence elsewhere, it seems unlikely that my stream will be found by many. Stream discovery and recommendations are the “solution” to this, but keeping tabs on thousands of streams and finding the best to recommend in real time will take a certain amount of scale before it can done properly.

Snapchat, the media company, makes content king and eliminates the relevance of a user’s network when posting to a Live Story. For example, I could sign up for Snapchat today, have 0 friends, submit content to a collective Story, and have it viewed by tens of millions of people around the world later that day. In Snapchat’s world, the quality of the content I produce is worth more than my social capital.

Product Philosophy

What has fascinated me about Snapchat, and what I believe has driven its success, is that every aspect of the platform is maniacally focused around lowering the social pressures around communicating with others. From making photos ephemeral to the stark absence of likes or favorites, Snapchat has embodied a clear product philosophy of low-barrier, low-pressure communication from very early on in its life.

Meerkat’s product is clearly not about lowering the social pressures of communicating. While streams are ephemeral, the idea of having to perform live for a group of people, without a second take, will be terrifying for many. Stage fright tops the list of fears for much of the general public, and Meerkat puts you a stage, invites the entire world, and constantly tells you how many people are watching, liking, and sharing.

I still believe that Meerkat embodies a very powerful idea of access and immersion, but some of its philosophies are fundamentally different from Snapchat’s, and I expect both companies’ product roadmaps to reflect this.

How It Might Play Out

Snapchat actually started dabbling in video streaming almost a year ago with its ‘Chat’ product. In line with the company’s philosophy, the experience is low-barrier and pressure free - you’re not on a stage, you’re sitting across from a friend. Snapchat is almost certainly exploring many other avenues for live video moving forward and has been actively hiring a Live Video Specialist since sometime in December or January (right around Twitter’s acquisition of Periscope).

The million, or probably multi-billion, dollar question is where and Snapchat and Meerkat (or your live-streaming app of choice) will eventually cross paths and compete. I’ll go through four potential content areas here, from my most to least confident predictions.

1) Day-to-Day Life Streaming

I do not believe that Meerkat will ever gain sustained traction for normal people sharing their everyday lives with friends. Snapchat Stories strike a delicate balance between low pressure sharing and asynchronicity, and Meerkat misses on both of these marks. I don’t believe my friends will drop everything they’re doing to watch me go about my day (nor would I want to pressure them to).

Even if Meerkat doesn’t gain traction in streaming day-to-day occurrences, will Snapchat supplement its core Stories product with one-to-friends live streaming? While many seem to think so, I’m not convinced. As mentioned, turning on a camera and telling users to perform live seems anxiety-inducing in a way that Snapchat tries to avoid. A move like opening up live streaming to groups of close friends would seem more in line with their product philosophy.

2) “Earthquake” Moments

Famously, in the early days of Twitter, Jack Dorsey was sitting at his desk when his phone vibrated with a tweet about an earthquake in San Francisco. A second later, the building started to shake. Like Twitter, Meerkat embodies this ability for unique, “earthquake” moments to spread quickly and ferociously. It is hard to imagine not having live video of the next major protests, celebrations, or catastrophes. This is where Meerkat will truly shine and will be indispensable in the future.

Snapchat platform doesn’t support this kind of breaking news and I don’t believe they will try to. If Twitter is the place you hear about the earthquake, and Meerkat is the place you watch live streams of the earthquake, Snapchat will be place where you can watch the recap of the earthquake in semi-real time from dozens of perspectives. This won’t be easy, as they will have to move very quickly to set up Stories soon after news or events break, but that’s what media companies have to do all the time. Snapchat’s new ‘Discover’ page, which media outlets only update every 24-hours, also supports the idea that they are in the business of recapping news and events, not breaking it.

3) Celebrities

Celebrities and social media influencers will be vital to both Snapchat and Meerkat moving forward. There are already makeshift ways to find the top Snapchatters to follow and, within the year, I believe Snapchat will start natively promoting some of these influencer. People and brands will eventually pay to be featured, and I think Snapchat has saved space in the Add Friends page for just this reason.

While Snapchat could possibly become the main tool celebrities use to broadcast their lives, Meerkat is no doubt a compelling platform to stream significant moments or events (award shows, birthday parties, etc.) Will celebrities use both products, for different types of occasions? Will they have to constantly switch back and forth? No idea, though it’s fathomable that Snapchat might try to strike exclusivity deals with certain celebrities or brands. This would be a move that’s almost unheard of in the social world, yet very common in the media world.

4) Events

Events will be the most active and fascinating area of competition between Snapchat and Meerkat. In addition to the “earthquake” moments, these live events, such as sports games, concerts, or even interviews, are right in Meerkat’s wheelhouse. It would be relatively easy for Meerkat to collect and promote streams from specific events for viewers to swipe through, and if everyone at an event is trying to get their stream featured on Meerkat, guess what they’re not doing? Using Snapchat.

This puts Snapchat at a fork in the road that gets to the crux of their general conundrum - curation and live will always be inherently at odds. If Snapchat sticks solely with curated content such as Our Stories, which are an amazing recap for most people but are only semi-live by nature, they risk being overtaken by the new, more instantly immersive apps. The other option, of supporting and promoting live video, means at least partially ditching their curated media strategy and deviating slightly from their core product philosophies.

Snapchat is not one to move slowly and, if they see live streaming gaining traction with a real, critical mass in events, they might attempt to strike a balance between live streams and curation. But I don’t expect them to simply just jump on the trend without an extremely compelling way to do so that aligns with their vision.

Thanks for reading! If you made it this far, you might enjoy my tweets.

Thanks to Billy Gallagher, Heston Berkman, and Dillon Chen for helping brainstorm and edit this!