You Need a Better Data Plan to Meerkat

By Karen Fratti 

With the launch of Periscope today and the figures of how much Meerkatting was going on at SXSW, we can officially say that live-streaming is a thing. Sounds democratic, right? Not so much, reports Mashable this week. We loathe our cable and Internet providers and our cell providers. But they love when we start to Meerkat.

Streaming eats up about 4 megabytes and watching a stream takes 2.3 megabytes. That’s a lot data and depending on your view, it’s either worth upping your data plan or just turning on the WiFi only setting in the app. As Jason Abbruzzese at Mashable reports, the whole point is the spontaneity when it comes to live-streaming. And using WiFi only takes away from that. When you’re shelling out an extra $30-4-/month, that takes some of the fun out of it, too.

BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk tells Mashable that:

Historically, operators, because of concern for their network, would have gone to an application like [Meerkat] and said, ’You have to compress this because it’s going to kill our network. Now, I think operators are saying, ‘Do whatever you want because we want consumers to upgrade to a bigger data bucket.’

That’s just wrong and a bit of a buzzkill when you start to think about how live-streaming apps are supposed to be the next big thing. It will also affect the bias of content on the app: news organizations should be loving the new streaming apps, but if you’re in the middle of nowhere with a wimpy data plan, what good is the technology?

Advertisement