Meerkat: what happened, and why it shut down

Meerkat was an iPhone app that let anyone broadcast live video to their Twitter followers with one tap. Released on 27 February 2015, it was the hit of the SXSW festival two weeks later and raised about $14 million. Twitter cut off its access to the follower graph and launched Periscope, Facebook added Live, and by 2016 use had collapsed. Its maker, Life on Air, shut Meerkat down on 4 October 2016 and put the team on Houseparty.

Timeline [edit]

2015

27 February 2015 Launch

Meerkat launches on iPhone

One tap to stream to your Twitter followers.

13 March 2015 Decline

Twitter cuts Meerkat off from the follower graph

In the middle of SXSW.

26 March 2015 other

Periscope launches

Twitter's own live streaming app.

April 2015 Funding

About $14 million raised

At a reported $40 million valuation.

2016

28 September 2016 Shutdown announced

Life on Air says it has moved to Houseparty

4 October 2016 Shutdown

Meerkat shuts down

Metric	Value	As of	Confidence
Valuation (USD) ▲	$40M	April 2015	Reported Reported valuation at the SXSW-era funding round

Metric

Value

As of

Confidence

Valuation (USD) ▲

$40M

April 2015

Reported Reported valuation at the SXSW-era funding round

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Life on Air, the company behind Meerkat, told Fortune in late September 2016 that it had stopped work on live streaming and was putting everything into Houseparty, a group video chat app; the Meerkat app was shut down on 4 October 2016. Ben Rubin said retention had collapsed and that competing with Twitter and Facebook for mass live streaming was not a fight a small company could win.

Our analysis: Meerkat is the standard case study in platform risk. It was built on Twitter: you signed in with Twitter, your followers found you through Twitter, and every stream was announced as a tweet. Twitter bought Periscope in January 2015, before Meerkat had even peaked, and in March cut Meerkat off from the social graph, which removed the growth engine overnight. Facebook Live then made live video a button on the biggest app in the world. What is unusual is what the team did next: instead of dying quietly they turned the same technology into Houseparty, which Epic Games bought three years later.

History [edit]

Two weeks of being the future

Meerkat came out of Life on Air, an Israeli team led by Ben Rubin that had already burned through two failed products. It launched on 27 February 2015 and did one thing: you pressed a button and your phone streamed live to your Twitter followers, who got a tweet with a link and could watch and comment in real time. No editing, no upload, no delay.

Two weeks later it took over South by Southwest in Austin. Journalists, musicians and everyone who wanted to be seen early streamed their panels and their queues and their dinners; Jimmy Fallon used it; venture capitalists put about $14 million in at a reported $40 million valuation. For a fortnight Meerkat was the most talked-about app in the technology press.

The graph gets cut

Twitter had bought Periscope, a competing live streaming startup, in January 2015 for a reported $86 million, before Meerkat had its moment. On 13 March 2015, in the middle of SXSW, Twitter cut Meerkat off from its social graph: new users could no longer pull in their Twitter followers automatically. Periscope launched on 26 March with the graph and a place inside Twitter itself. Facebook rolled out Live through 2015 and 2016 to a billion people.

Meerkat kept shipping, added a Cameo feature that let viewers take over a stream, and watched retention fall anyway. In late September 2016 Rubin told Fortune the company had stopped work on it. The app went dark on 4 October 2016 and the team put everything into Houseparty, a group video chat app that had come out of the same technology, which Epic Games bought in 2019 and shut down in 2021.

The domain today

meerkatapp.co no longer serves the app. Life on Air became Houseparty; Periscope, the competitor that killed Meerkat, was itself shut down by Twitter in March 2021.

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Meerkat

Timeline [edit]

The site through time

Ownership [edit]

Key figures [edit]