Meerkat Is TV's Next, Next Thing

Ever since Twitter “broke” at SXSW in 2007, industry observers have been looking for the new new thing, the technology that they can say “I was there first” about.

There haven’t been many wins on that front since 2007 (FourSquare and GroupMe both arguably had their moments in the sun) but that seems all but guaranteed to change this year, thanks to new live streaming start-up called Meerkat.

The output of a Bay Area company called Life on Air with roots in Israel, Meerkat allows users to livestream video directly from a Twitter feed. Launching the app calls up a screen that invites you to start streaming and then tweets the news of the livestream directly to Twitter.

That’s it: no editing, no special effects. And the stream is gone once it’s done: Meerkat just leaves a placeholder frame in place with the message that the stream is over. This Snapchattian feature is easily overcome, however, as Meerkat allows you to save the video to your iPhone (an Android version is coming soon) where you can upload it to YouTube, Facebook or, if it’s shorter than 30 seconds, Twitter.

All the usual suspects are playing with it and I suspect that almost every panel at SXSW will have someone Meerkatting it. In most cases, several someones. (Confession: I Meerkatted the last audience question of the panel I did at BBTVCON last week and was surprised to find I’d accumulated 10 viewers in just two minutes time.)

So what is the application of this new 2nd screen app for the television industry?

It can be a great driver of live tune-in, particularly for shows like news, sports and even talk shows, that are filmed live. Meerkat offers the ability to show off behind-the-scenes activity, uncensored, as it’s happening. It gives TV news crews the ability to stream what’s essentially raw footage from the scene of breaking events, along with their own commentary. It can even be used by scripted series to show off the cast and crew during a table read or similar meeting where the audience gets to see the cast in “unscripted” mode.

CNBC has already been experimenting with Meerkat, webcasting host Jim Kramer’s ringing of the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate his show “Mad Money’s” 10th anniversary.

 CNBC's Meerkat Stream

That’s exactly the type of use case Meerkat is good for. Smart network marketers will promote the webcasts ahead of time so that viewers will know when to be looking for them. And with Twitter’s new third party ad serving system in place, those Meerkat streams can be pushed out to additional sites and apps where users can engage with them.

Since Meerkat users need to sign in via Twitter, there’s a lot of data that can be gleaned from the app: who was watching, for how long, what are their demographics, have they engaged with the show previously, what else do they tweet about, what else do they follow.

While Meerkat will never be another Facebook (at least not with its current functionality) it’s a very well done value-add for Twitter, and showrunners and network marketing teams should definitely look into experimenting with it.

As for us, we’re keeping on eye on which shorthand emerges from SXSW this week. Will people be #Meering or will they be #Katting? We’ll keep you posted.

Originally published at www.2ndscreensociety.com on March 12, 2015. on March 12, 2015.

Just Ignore Them

Lot of bitching and moaning about the number of corporate sponsors at SXSW this year. I'm not sure why though: most everyone I know seemed to more or less ignore them. (Or at least the ones that weren't their clients.)

None of them provided anything I really needed or wanted. (Okay, I did use the very clean bathroom at some brands "party space" but the "space"-- a parking lot covered with AstroTurf- had club-level house music blasting, along with some picnic tables and chairs, and I could not for the life of me figure out why I'd want to stay there once I was done. Nor do I remember the brand.)

But back to the original topic: most people seemed to be blowing by the big brand-sponsored booths on their way to someplace more relevant. The GE Solar Carousel was cool to look at when I walked past it, but that was all they got from me: "cool merry-go-round, guys."

The lesson seems to be you can't graft something artificial onto something whose salient feature is authenticity. Both the purpose of the conference itself, and the food, bars and overall scene of the city of Austin.

Let them come. If they were smart, they'd pay for a speaker or two instead of setting up what are essentially giant trade show booths in the conference center.

Without the pens or free t-shirts

Why Doesn't This TV Have A Pause Button?

The NY Times Sunday Magazine is running yet another story about those Wacky Millennials and how darn ornery they are.

Though at least this time the author has the common sense to admit that (a) similar stories citing fairly identical attributes have been written about every single group of twentysomethings since World War II and (b) all these stories tend to focus on upper middle class kids, since they’re the ones with the financial resources to take their time settling down and starting their adult lives.

(Sidenote: given Google, you'd think the people who write the myriad "millennials are changing the workplace/world" articles would do their homework and reference the identical articles that were written about Xers and Boomers back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.)

From where I’m standing though, the biggest shift in the white collar workforce happened sometime in the mid-late 1980s or thereabouts, when PCs were introduced as standard equipment. Suddenly, no matter what industry you were in, you had people who could compose directly on the computer and print out their own documents. (Prior to this, you were either composing with a pad and pen or you were dictating. If you’ve ever tried to dictate a letter, it’s definitely a lost art and not an easy skill to learn.) This meant an end to mad typing skills, and, ultimately, the “typing pool” -- a room many larger organizations had where the fifth iteration of a document was retyped quickly and flawlessly.

But corporate structure aside, the ability to conceptualize on a computer screen, even a black one with amber or green type, was a huge shift in the way people worked with and thought about media in general - screens had previously been a place where we watched video as part of a shared experience, so reading and writing on them was a huge leap. Trite as it now sounds, word processing in many ways set the stage for our comfort with the internet, another place where we interacted with type on a screen.

The next paradigm shift in media is likely to come from the generation that’s currently in elementary and preschool, kids born after the year 2000. Many of whom (the upper middle class American ones, anyway) don’t remember a world without 3G internet connectivity from mom or dad’s smart phone, which means that for them, the internet truly is “like air” and they see it the way the rest of us see electricity or running water. That means everything lives in the cloud for them, nothing is locked into a time-based schedule and that’s got to signal a shift in how they experience the media they're consuming.

That shift, what it means and how we can start preparing for it, is the topic of my proposed SXSW panel this year, entitled “Why Doesn’t This TV Have A Pause Button?”  You can see all the details around it and vote for it here (voting counts for 30% of the decision.)

Thanks.

SXSW Panel Proposal: Don't Suck

It's that time of year again when we get to vote on SXSW panel proposals.

If you remember, last year, this video of a panel I did with Brian Morrissey, Ian Schafer, Michael Lebowitz and Noah Brier (featuring a special guest appearance by Cam Beck) was selected for Extended Content.

This year, I'm hoping to make it to the big time with a live panel called "Don't Suck: Sound Strategies For The Social Web" and YOUR VOTE COUNTS.

You can read all about the panel and vote for it here. Even tell all your friends to vote for it. Maybe promote it on Twitter and Facebook.

Or not.

Here's a brief description from the SXSW site:

Success in social media boils down to two simple words: Don't Suck. What that means is that if people actually like your brand, they will rally to your defense when missteps happen and they will do your advertising for you. This panel will discuss ways companies can make sure their brands don't suck and offer up case studies of brands who have successfully used "not sucking" as a way to turn around a potentially bad situation.

(FWIW, you can see the original "Don't Suck" post here.)

Search vs Serendipity: Some Proof

Nick Kristof has a great column in the Times today called "The Daily Me" that lays out much of the research showing how new media options allow people to only see news they agree with. He doesn't offer a solution but lays out the problem in nice detail as some of the commenters here seemed skeptical of the proposition.

Search vs. Serendipity

One of the more interesting themes I heard at SXSW was the battle between search and serendipity and the ramifications of that for everything from our intellectual curiosity to the ability of new ideas to find an audience.

The battle manifests itself in so much of what we do online. Take reading the newspaper. When we read a physical newspaper, we often find things we weren’t looking for: a picture or a headline catches our eye as we flip through the paper and we wind up learning something new and unexpected.

But the current structure of online newspapers makes that unlikely. We only click through to read those 4 or 5 top headlines our homepage widget deems important along with the articles some self-selected news reader filter has brought us.

And it’s that promise: that technology can ensure we read and find only those things that interest us, that’s at the crux of the problem. Because what that paradigm ultimately does is allow us to limit ourselves to merely reconfirming things we already know. It doesn’t expose us to anything new and more importantly, it doesn’t allow us the serendipity of discovering something we didn’t know we were looking for.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous, this dilemma does too. Amazon recommends books and movies based on what we’ve read or watched. The iTunes Genius feature shows us songs just like the ones we already own. Websites show us headlines from media outlets based on our current interests.

Even something as seemingly innocuous as Facebook Connect only serves to reinforce this dilemma. Countless studies have shown that people tend to hold similar views to their friends and so a stream of recommendations from friends is bound to only give us more of the same.

The solution to search vs. serendipity isn’t an obvious one. Throwing in a “now for something completely different” recommendation is more likely to annoy than to entice: a random outlier is not serendipity. Technology is not yet at a point where it can predict those unexpected items that will appeal to us. And the very act of suggestion takes away the joy of discovery.

Yet at the same time, we want and need the benefits of search. We want to find thing quickly and easily and it would be foolish to pretend that we don't have explicit preferences as to the types of music, books, films, news or even food we prefer or that learning more about these subjects was somehow intellectually lazy.

The solution appears to be in the ability of user experience and design professionals to produce an interface that more closely resembles the literal experience of browsing while allowing us to find what we want when we want it. A "serendipity enabler," if you will. It’s something that community is already hard at work on, and I’ve seen some interesting starts, such as this prototype for The New York Times.

Until then, however, serendipity will have to be the result of a proactive decision.

UPDATE (3/19) - Nicholas Kristof has a great column in the Times today that lays out much of the research behind the "search vs serendipity" claim.