#H2HChat: Debating the fate of Meerkat and Periscope with Robert Scoble & Brian Fanzo

How are you, by the way?

Hey, everybody. How are you doing? This is Bryan Kramer. We're live here on another H2H Chat. So excited to be here today. Thanks for being a little flexible and moving the time up. We wanted to make sure that we had 2 really, really awesome people on this chat here today. The first person that we have is my co-host, Suzie McCarthy. Suzie, how are you doing today?

Doing well, doing well, thank you.

Awesome, good to see you in New York. And then the second person is our guest, one of 2 guests here today, the guy that's holding his cell phone up. That, if you don't know him by now, is Robert Scoble. He is meerkatting. Welcome.

We got a Meerkat on this debate. I wish I could do both Meerkat and Periscope at the same time.

I am Periscoping just so we have another—

There we go.

Another one here. Then our second person, another great friend of mine, I'm excited to have him here today, Bryan Panzo. How are you doing?

I am wonderful. I hate to say it, but if I have to start off the chat and I get one victory, I'm going to take my web camera and let you guys see But I'm actually Meerkatting and Periscoping with my iPad Mini and my iPhone 6 Plus.

Damn.

So if I get one win, that's my— that'll be my win. So I got them both stacked up with dueling iPod little holders. I got a MirrorPod and a tripod going, so I'm ready for this.

Yay!

I was going to say, there was a photo of you doing that at Amplify, so I was like, you know what, Fanzo has it figured out somehow.

Bryan, what was this debate about? I sort of forget the context of why we started this whole thing. I know I was mouthing off about Meerkat and Periscope.

That's a good question. One of the things that we want to make sure that we're talking about here is the future of streaming. It's not necessarily just Meerkat and Periscope, but I think it started out also with a conversation that happened online. between you two on a question that you threw out to your Facebook fans and friends about the future of streaming, but also, is it— has it matured enough? Yeah. Is it ready for what's happened? I mean, when you take a look at history, and I'll throw out a question here to you guys in a sec, but just to set things up a little bit, I mean, when you look at how quickly it came on at South by Southwest this year, And then fast forward what happened at the Mayweather fight and how streaming has changed, you know, the way that people have paid for streaming versus free streaming is a large part of it. But then again, is it ready? Are we ready? So let's, let's start off with that question. Are we ready?

Well, and, and that's been a question for a long time actually, not just because I used to livestream on a Nokia camera. In fact, I was in Elon Musk's car before the iPhone came out You know, live streaming off of a Nokia camera on Qwik and Kite. You know, if you forget those guys, they're already gone. And now there's a whole bunch of these new streamers. There's Hangwith, there's StringWire from NBC News, there's YouNow, and now there's this Meerkat and Periscope. I think Meerkat and Periscope are different, and they're different because they have this social stream over on top of them. And that's what really makes them fun. It's not— for me, it's not so much about the video, it's the social stream. In fact, right now I see people liking and retweeting and commenting right on top of the social stream that I started up. In fact, you can—

No, I agree.

Yeah, Bryan, what do you think?

No, I think you're— I mean, to me, there's the element here where a lot of those apps, they really made us kind of create our own network or reinvent a network on another platform. and it didn't take advantage of all the hard work we've already done. And I think the fact that this auto-pushes out into our social channels, you know, it gives everybody a link for everybody to kind of participate, but it really, you know, it's that one-click button, it automatically posts to Twitter, it's taking advantage of that. And I think to me that's the big piece. And also another one, Robert, maybe I think this is an interesting one, even when you were doing it, now Elon Musk's car must have not needed Wi-Fi, but for me I think the fact that these apps came out after the iPhone 6 existed is actually a big difference because my front camera sucked until really the iPhone 6 to where I could actually take advantage of it for this kind of video. Yeah. Before, I think there was other apps where the video was so kind of kludgy, and I think it's ridiculous. That's a whole other concept on the NHL trying to block these apps because nobody is watching a damn hockey game on a wobbly mobile device. The fact that the camera is better now than it used to be, I think that's a big reason why these apps have kind of taken off when they have as well.

But I gave up live streaming not because of the quality problems, not because the network sucked, but because of something else, and I don't think people really have come to realize it, particularly if you're building— if you're doing this to build an audience. It's one thing to talk to 100 people. But it's another thing if you want an audience of millions, and that's because most of the people who watched my live video back in those days watched it recorded. Out of 1,000 people, only 10 would watch it live and be interacting with it. And I actually like the interaction now because I can see people saying good morning and talking to me and stuff like that, and it really helps my interviews. But I can't record this thing, and it pisses me off.

So you can, we can get into that real quick, but you actually can now.

Can you record the social stream?

No, you can't, the comments on top of the video in the app don't allow you to record.

And that's what's interesting about these things.

No, I agree, but for me, I actually use— so the time aspect is a big one for me, so every video that I've done on both Meerkat and Periscope are living on a YouTube channel that I made a landing page for. So that allows me, even Jay Baer now is recording.

I know you can record the video, I did a video with the guy who runs Coachella on Meerkat, that's up there thanks to Catch, the service Catch. For people who don't know Catch, if you use Meerkat and you use the hashtag Catch in your videos, it will automatically record it and put it up on YouTube. That's cool. you missed the social stream, and the social stream that day was so amazing. The comments and the questions that were flowing in were so interesting, and they're gone. I really wish that Meerkat had recorded everything together and put it up. I think this is really going to matter if Meerkat is going to get deep into Facebook, which it's heading toward. Let's be honest, Periscope is bought by Twitter, it's owned by Twitter. The user— the follower growth is faster on Periscope because of that. Twitter shut down Meerkat's ability to really talk to the social graph and spread virally, i.e., spam the shit out of people. They've lost that ability. From what I understand from Josh Ellman, who's the investor in Meerkat, they're going and making a deep relationship with Facebook. But Facebook works different than Twitter. Twitter, when I tweet, everybody who follows my Twitter account sees it if they're watching, which is a big if. But they see it in real time. On Facebook, you don't see my posts. If I Facebooked right now and said, hey, there's a big stream going on, you might not see it for 8 hours because it's filtered. And that's how the filtering system doesn't show my item to everybody who's following, first of all, so only 5 or 10% of the people who follow my Facebook account will see any one item, and that one item might not be seen immediately. It might be seen in an hour, might be seen in 20 minutes, it might be seen in 8 hours, right? So Meerkat doesn't quite work for Facebook, the system Facebook, the way it worked on Twitter, but Twitter is deeply in bed with Periscope, and they're not going to allow Meerkat to go get much bigger.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the 2 separately? As we're talking about Periscope and Meerkat right now, what are your thoughts on each one?

Yeah, yeah, so I've done now about 220 on Meerkat and a little over 100 on Periscope. Yeah. And I kind of agree, Robert, on a lot of the points you're making. I think the play into Facebook is really important. Right now, I'm running beta for Meerkat. The Meerkat team has been amazing as far as daily reaching out, engaging with some of the power users. One of the nice things, it auto-posts to my Facebook page right now. Every time I go live on Meerkat, it automatically posts the link. But like you said, the dynamic piece— and I'm from the school of Scoble when it comes to Facebook reinvented itself for me 6 months ago when I took your advice on kind of dynamically teaching Facebook what the hell I wanted to see. Right. And really, I mean, the reason this chat happens is a great example of that. I think it was 2 in the morning and you had posted your comment about these apps need to be more mature. I jumped on there and commented, and really, for me, the piece that Meerkat could really do to take advantage of this is almost that replay like you were just saying. If they were able to actually allow that You know, even if it's allowing that hyperlink, so we— if you post to Facebook, but then when someone misses the live element, if they're able to see— when they find it in their feed 2 hours after it, they're able to click on that link, and instead of it going to that landing page that says livestream over, if it goes to the actual replay, I think that's a game changer with the Facebook integration.

Yeah, and, and I hope they get to that point. If they do, this becomes useful for the pro, uh, content developer. I mean, there's a lot of pros on these things already, but they're playing— let's be honest, they're playing around. They're not really doing a lot of great content, and the great content that is being developed gets lost almost instantly because, like here, I'm— well, I can't show you guys, but on Twitter, these things— my tweets go so fast that they go away pretty quickly, and it's hard to see where the good stuff is. And I don't watch Twitter all day long. I might come back and look at people who tweeted, you know, an hour later or something like that, and all of a sudden I see, you know, somebody like Chris Sacca did a really cool Periscope, and I can't watch it. You know,

it's

funny, there's one quick thing that I just want to enter into the mix, and that's that the world isn't on a vertical video either. How come we can't How come we can't tilt the video on either of them?

So for me, I'm a vertical video guy. I love vertical video, and I like— for me—

That's a whole other debate. Wait, wait, wait.

That is a whole other debate. The commenting element to me is the problem, because if you went horizontal, even on my iPhone 6 Plus, 3 comments on Periscope would take up the entire screen. So that to me is— and actually I have a fix for that, because I actually I sent them an enhancement request. I told them they should do a ticker on the comments rather than doing a scrolling up, and then we could go— we can switch the video.

The horizontal versus vertical debate is a deep one, and it gets to who are you and where are you watching. If you're watching on another mobile phone, vertical makes total sense. I don't like to hold my phone like this, particularly if I'm going to comment. And engage with people. Holding it vertically makes a whole lot more sense. But as an old-school video guy, I like to watch on the web. If I get back to my big screens, you know, these big screens, they're all horizontal because most video, like on YouTube, is horizontal. And if you watch on a huge, you know, HD screen, They're always horizontal. So I want to watch video, if it's really good video, I want to watch it horizontal on a big screen, right? But if I'm doing social behavior and I'm chatting with people on a mobile phone, vertical makes a lot of sense. It does. In fact, at Coachella I was watching who was shooting in what format and 2/3 of the 20-year-olds, you know, 17, 18, 19-year-olds who were at the music festival, 2/3 are using vertical. So the days of trying to convince people to shoot in horizontal are over, I believe.

I agree.

But I wish there was some software maybe to make it easier to shoot in vertical, get the social behavior, you know, to chat with your friends and chat with your audience, and then maybe have it made horizontal. And the cameras are getting good enough now to do that. But again, these things aren't really mature. In fact, there's some software that you can run to do that, but we haven't seen these guys really take an approach of let's do things for the mobile user because the shooting is happening on mobile and the social behavior is happening on mobile, but some people still want to watch on a big screen.

Well, you know, and I think on that same argument, I think one of the big myths on Periscope today is the fact you cannot comment or engage on videos in their browser. Meerkat you can, so anybody who's watching this on a browser in Meerkat can engage as if they were doing this on the phone. Periscope does not, and I mean, I took over the Social Media Today handle 2 weeks ago, and I would say that, you know, to talk about social shakeup, and I had, you know, 483 people watching that live, you know, me live promote that event, but because, you know, the people that were watching on the browser, when I asked them for engagement, when I asked them, How many people are going to the event? I went in there and looked, and I had over 340 people watching on the browser, and because they're disconnected from the conversation, it limits that app piece. So I agree on the vertical shooting. I also think when we're thinking about this, I mean, it's mobile first, but it also has to be browser-friendly. And I think Periscope— I know Periscope will eventually do that. And, you know, I'm curious too, you know, when we're talking about these apps, and you were talking about Coachella, you know, I was even, you know, I was at an IBM event with Bryan and Suzy earlier this week. Yeah. And, um, Aloe Blacc was performing, and Aloe Blacc was performing, and, um, I would say the IBM event didn't have a ton of people that were using these apps, but I, I looked around like you did at everybody who had their phones up taking video, and almost everyone was doing it upright. And I was— I kind of assumed the same thing you did and was like, wow, even these people that are recording it to their own devices. And I mean, I'm a little bit, you know, not only ADHD, but I usually, when I'm doing a lot of the Meerkatting, I even have my iPad Mini with me so that I can read the comments that are getting pushed to Twitter. So I like having my second hand free as well, being able to, you know, type or even, you know, kind of enjoy it. And there's another element, the selfie stick really works better, you know, upright as well.

Hey guys, what do you, what do you think? That's a good transition into, you know, Bryan, you're sitting there recording something that people paid for, and, you know, obviously that's a, that's a That's a thing that's happening a lot right now. The NHL just banned, which I'm going to have a hard time believing they're going to walk around the stadium telling everybody they need to take their phones down because they could be taking pictures. I don't know how they're going to be spotting the people that are using it, but the NHL just banned Periscope and Meerkat. Yeah. The NFL and the—

Let's talk about why. Yeah, why?

I

was invited out by— Just to get some context on this, I was invited out by the Indy— the Target Indy Racing team to shoot them, and they had somebody monitoring me to make sure I would not shoot the track. And it's like, dude, I'm here with the race team. I only want a few seconds of the car going by. I'm not gonna shoot the whole race or anything. No, no, no, no. We've sold the rights to the track to whatever network or TV network they were— had rights sold to. These things are huge money, like billions of dollars money, and they want to protect the TV rights of the sporting event.

Yeah, I'll give you another example of that. Mashable last night at the Billboard Music Awards, they had Mashable, they gave it to a correspondent that had Periscope, and it was awesome coverage. And she said, just to let you guys know, Entertainment Live has the exclusive rights. There's certain 15-minute time frames that I have to turn off my live streaming app because they're the only ones that have rights to the red carpet at that time. And that's— I mean, that was last night, last night when I was watching their Periscope. So I think, you know, I think that's interesting. Carrie Gorgone, um, just wrote an article, uh, today. She posted it out there with an infographic about, uh, the 5 things that people should worry about. But for me, there's an element here where, um, I don't think people should even— you know, I live streamed the entire Pacquiao fight, right? And I never once showed the TV, and never once did I get someone to bring it down. And what I did is I actually faced it towards the fans of all of us watching it in the room, and so you got to see the excitement, you got to see the engagement, the randomness. But for me, I don't think of this as— and this is why I've been calling it mobile broadcasting, not mobile live streaming, because I don't want to replace the live stream. I don't want to replace pay-per-view. I want to add unique value, unique insights. And you know, my philosophy— I've had now 7 brands that have reached out that I'm working on strategy, and my philosophy is pretty simple. Think like a fan. What access can you give that your fans would love to see? I mean, think about it, Robert, for your side. I mean, you do podcasts. I mean, you have every— I would love to go to every drone event that you go to. I mean, your Facebook feed is one that it's like fear of missing out exists because of your Facebook feed. Right. And for me, it's like, hey, I want to see Robert getting out of the car, going over, and getting the behind the scenes of the drone, even though someone else is streaming it or your sponsor has it on coverage. I think the real advantage of this is when people take advantage of it and think like a fan and give unique perspective. Don't just mirror what you can get somewhere else. I think that's kind of the big advantage.

Yeah, well, but let's wrap up the professional. These things are going to be protected because of the business models of the sporting event, and they are really scared by this new technology because it's getting good enough to compete with real TV. The cameras on my iPhone are good enough. That was not the case 6 years ago when I was playing with Quick and Kite. Now the quality is good enough to compete head-on, and the fans are getting close enough to get good shots.

Well, here's one.

Even at that Indy race, I was right on the track, right? And I was able to get content that the pros weren't able to get. You know, if I was able to shoot it. But

what was stopping us, you know, I mean, I remember, you know, and I will channel because I'm an Apple fanboy, I remember Justin.tv and Ustream on people's hacked cameras for the Steve Jobs iPhone announcements, right? And we were watching those streams from in there, and, you know, it was hacked through 3 FTP servers. But it's the same thing, like, you know, tilting a web camera towards a TV for a live event, you know, I think that is kind of I don't think that's much of a difference. But here's what really bothered me about the NHL, and I'm a die-hard hockey fan, played hockey in college. One of my favorite use cases is the Pittsburgh Penguins using Periscope, and here's the interesting part. They put out their announcement that they wanted to black out people, the fans, from using these tools, but they actually put out a policy for their social media teams to leverage them because it's such great access to their sport. Yeah. I don't think you can have it both ways. That's very ridiculous in the NHL's mind because the fact that I get to go in the locker room with Sidney Crosby instead of hearing the 10-second SportsCenter clip, I get the 4-minute interview with him. I will jump in there, and I think that's where the NHL is missing it, is the advantage they get on the other side, they have to allow people to leverage it, the fans as well.

By the way, there is technology that exists that would let them fingerprint the video in real time and know that you're copying somebody else's broadcast, and they could shut you down. It's just, that's an expensive technology, you need a lot of servers, it costs more money, and these things are all startups. They— well, Periscope now is owned by Twitter, so Twitter could do it, but Meerkat can't afford that even though they got, I think, what, $12 million investment?

Yeah, well, that would just mean more servers in Rackspace, right?

I'm all cool with that, but I'm also cool with having the entrepreneur win. There's no way to be profitable if you're going to spend that kind of money on the backend. It's technology that Rackspace doesn't own, so you would have to license it from somebody who does own it, like Yahoo. They're not going to be cheap. It's not going to be cheap on your servers. It's going to be something that requires a lot of server time, and it'll introduce other problems. That something will go get kicked off just because you walk through an area where there's a TV running and the audio fingerprint works and all of a sudden, boom, your video stream goes away because you broke copyright. I'd rather have an open system where we put it on the owner, on the users not to steal content. But it's going to be a problem because I could shoot a screen with my iPhone and the quality is good enough to certainly watch a fight. Really, what kind of content is there in the fight? There's 2 people up on the ring fighting, most of what I want to do is talk to my friends about it.

Let's change the direction. I

don't want to pay the $50 either to watch it.

I want to talk a little bit about reporting and how this technology can be used in not just social media but actually reporting events. Yeah. How can this be a useful tool? This is kind of one of those tools right now where everybody's starting to use it because it's cool, it's fun. We get to be in an event, we get to show the behind the scenes, but where does this start to become useful?

I love it.

It's useful right now. If that building blew up right now and started on fire, the first thing I would do is turn my Meerkat on the building across the street. burning up, you know, and people around the world would watch that building burning up. And we've seen videos like that, right? Yeah, that's what I had to talk about.

But naturally, I didn't go to Twitter for the tornado like I normally would. My first instinct was, I wonder who's on Meerkat or Periscope. And that to me was crazy, because I always go to Twitter for my live news because it's the unfiltered pipeline. But for me, this whole event aspect and really taking advantage of it is, I think, you know, HootSuite did an amazing job, and I give some shoutouts to HootSuite. Hootsuite did it, they said follow the sun, and they gave access to their Periscope account to one person at every one of their locations globally at every business. And for 30 minutes they walked around their location interviewing people, showing the culture. That was an HR tool, that was— I mean, the amount of things that to me, not only that, but the data that exists on that. And I think the data is underestimated, and people ask me the most popular question I get now after 350 live streams on these 2 apps is, Bryan, which one do you like more? And I still think it's too early to tell, but the reason I lean towards Meerkat is because the ability for my users to be able to comment and get pushed to Twitter, I'm able to leverage that data. I have everyone into a private Twitter list. It then goes into a report. I run reports and analytics, and I know Suzy, a fellow data geek when it comes to social data, I then run analytics and understand the insights of these new followers of mine so that I can provide better content to my audience. And that ability to leverage that data— I mean, here's the thing. Periscope, you have to keep the data stuck in Periscope. Your video replays are stuck in Periscope. When you retweet it or share the broadcast, when you swipe from left to right in Periscope, it only shares it with a mobile pop-up push notification. It doesn't push that same thing to Twitter. So to me, the ability to bridge communities and push that data is how these brands will truly take advantage of it.

That was actually— I'll jump in quickly. That was a question that just came in on the audience was kind of, you know, how are we gauging this, you know, and how are we deciding that this is an add to our community and not just, you know, someone's flipping through Periscope and saying, or Meerkat, and saying, hey, I see that, I see, you know, the other thing. Right. As you know, analytics, when it comes to turning this into, you know, advert, anything in the future, it's gonna have to come to reporting.

Yeah, the problem, the problem for the news guys, and it gets back to the earlier complaint I have about this, is one, if I'm shooting this for a CNN-style audience, I wanna have it in horizontal, I want it to be as high a quality as possible. And so that means horizontal, and that's why I would probably use something like StringWire. I would probably bias my choices, and I can only choose one, you know, I can only decide to use one. And the second thing is, most people— let's say I did shoot that building burning down. Now, I've watched a building burning down. It's only burning for 13 minutes before the fire department gets here and puts it out. Right. By the time the average person hears that there's an interesting-looking video to watch, the meerkat's over because by the time it got to them, even on Twitter, keep in mind most people don't read me on Twitter, right? I have 450,000 followers. There's 300 million people on Twitter, so how is it going to get to that 300 millionth person? On Twitter, it's going to be retweeted through a chain of people, right? And so by the time the 300 millionth person gets it, it's maybe 2 days later, 3 days later, maybe even a week later, right? And so most people are not going to watch it live, and so why would I bias my video behavior for the live audience? Why wouldn't I pull out my HD cameras? I mean, I have I have a new GoPro setup with 6 GoPros, I should pull it out and show it to you, that does 360-degree video. I mean, if that building really burned down, that's what I would pull out. I would go over there and start shooting with my 360 camera so that, yeah, it would take me a few hours to get up on the internet, but you would watch a building burning down in 360 degrees.

Well, but I think it's the same—

With a little cell phone.

It's the same, this is the same existence though, I think, for me. So I'm doing a podcast, and I have a much smaller audience, much smaller community, but for me, when I started live streaming my podcast recording, I increased subscribers, and I think that's something important to know, because I started giving them access into how I do it, and some of the screw-ups, and the people that were consuming it on live stream, A, they're not going to consume it on live stream every single time they're there, and B, you know, there was an element of almost— not only driving new viewership, but I was also able to kind of, um, you know, provide people that whole idea of think like a fan and give them new access. So my subscribers actually, I mean, I'm talking a pretty good 25% uptick based on when I started using Meerkat behind the scenes of a podcast that really ultimately for my sponsors has its most value when it's recorded.

Yeah, I just pulled out my 360 camera so you guys could see. In fact, it's really interesting that the media world is innovating on 2 edges. One is experiential video like this, where you can actually be inside this little box and see all 360 degrees, as well as this new live stuff on cell phones. And the live stuff is getting hype right now because of a whole other bunch of reasons, but I think the 360 stuff is actually much more interesting. But it's next year's argument. It's going to be South by Southwest next year because everybody's going to just be getting their Oculus Rift, and there's going to be a lot of hunger for really interesting content on Oculus Rift.

Well, so what do you guys think is going to happen? There's a great question here that I want to ask from— let's see, that came in from Sorry, I don't have the name, but it said, will we run into ownership issues? Who truly owns or is responsible for the experience for the individual streaming?

Oh, I'm a fan. I worked in cyber for a long time, and I think the illusion of control and ownership is an illusion. I don't like the control argument at all. To me, it's, you know, if you're getting an app for free today, You're paying with your data, and don't mistake that. I think people that want control, that's a whole other game. I think we should stop worrying about control and start worrying about creating experiences. If brands worry about that, the control aspect is something that you no longer worry about because you're creating an experience that other people can't replicate.

Yeah, keep in mind—

That's Frank Miller, by the way. Keep

in mind, I'm a public face of a public company. I work for Rackspace. I go around the world and interview tech executives. around the world, and I do that in real time. So they have to trust that I'm not going to damage their brand. And if I ever do something to damage their brand, I'm going to get fired. It's what both of us understand.

Well, it's funny, that's the 5-letter word that brands are going to struggle with these apps— trust. If you can't trust your employees, if you can't trust that they're not going to be stupid, because you can't fix stupid. I don't care what app, what privacy law, what technology you put behind it, but if you can't trust your employees— I mean, to your point, Robert, I worked for IO Data Centers for a long while. I was at OpenStack with you, and we did the OpenStack events. I remember because we were going through about going public, the amount of PR scrutiny and the amount of things that I had to go through for my checklist before I went on stage was ridiculous. Yeah. It handicapped me, and I would never want to go through that again, but that to me was only okay during that time when we were trying to go public. Compared to what we're dealing with now. I think companies today have to really trust not only their employees, but trust that the value— I mean, to me, I'm not going to tune into something because of like a one-off experience. And I think it goes back to Jay Baer's utility, right? I mean, I think if you're creating great value, even if it's great content and you're giving it away, people are going to look at you as the trusted resource. And Robert, I think it's the same way. I mean, people can go to how many different reviews over and over for products and and experiences, but it's the insight and the value that you provide on a consistent basis is what people come back to you for.

Yeah, and I care deeply about my relationship with my audience. It's why I don't take advertising, it's why I don't take bribes for the most part, and if I do take a bribe like that Vizio TV behind me, I disclose that I got that TV for free, right? Because otherwise you're just selling out your audience if you're taking bribes and taking— if you have a conflict of interest that you don't disclose.

So then here's a question. I'm kind of filtering through some of the general sentiment that I'm getting. Just by the way, a shout out to everyone who's watching. Love your comments, guys. Give me some questions and I will go ahead and shoot them over to our great panel here.

By the way, I touched on something with Oculus because my Twitter stream just went a little nuts. People are arguing with me about Oculus.

Oh, you jump on Oculus, as you well know, and it goes insane. And they'll jump in too, often.

Most of the comments are like, oh, it'll never catch on with the mainstream, it's too expensive, blah blah blah blah blah.

Sounds like another H2H chat for us.

Well, this is mixed with this live— what I'm going to try to do is put a holder on my monopod so I can do Meerkat at the same time I'm doing 360 video. But the problem—

There you go, Robert. See, that's what I've been doing. I've been building out a unique pod so I can have my iPad sitting behind it too. I'm with you.

The problem is with doing that is like I was at Maker Faire yesterday, right? And I couldn't get good enough bandwidth there because there's 100,000 people in a field and the mobile networks are just oversaturated and I'm barely able to make a text there. And I've found this over and over again when I'm in something interesting like Coachella, I can't even get a cell phone call out. Much less start up Meerkat and start live broadcasting in a reliable way.

Yeah, I just did an interview yesterday and they asked me what the 2 biggest limitations were for these apps, and it's Wi-Fi or data coverage and damn cell phone battery drainage. I carried around— I went to an event Saturday night with our friend Ted Rubin, we did a tweet-up here. I had 4 Mophie battery packs with me. How ridiculous is that? That in this age where we're innovating, we're having all these things, and I love my iDevices, I'm carrying around enough battery power that because these apps and this technology is draining, so I think that is something we can't underestimate.

Tell me about it. I got these new batteries that have 4 USB outlets each, so I can charge up 6 GoPros at the same time, all while walking around Coachella, because these things suck battery. in a far worse way than the iPhone does. But the iPhone really starts sucking battery when it can't get a consistent signal to a cell tower, which is always the case at one of these sporting events or music festivals or even Maker Faire or any tech conference. Every time I go to a tech conference, no matter how good— how much money they've spent, I can never get good bandwidth out, you know.

Well, Bryan Kramer, I was with you, right, for the first time we ever did Meerkat We were at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and getting a Wi-Fi signal or data signal between apps on that showroom floor was a nightmare. I think my first 3 Meerkats were about 60 seconds long because eventually the data signal dropped out. I think that's a huge issue.

Yeah, we had to

get

on their private network for that booth.

Don't you guys think that this is enabling everyone to be the media? What is the difference between now the media, and I mean the paid media, and everyone else? Aren't we all kind of morphing into one?

Absolutely, absolutely, and this has been a trend for a while. I mean, Instagram put photography in everybody's hands, and remember all the arguments all the professional photographers had was, oh my God, my career is going away, and in a lot of cases They did. Let me get my camera here. The guy who gave me this Nikon is Paul Sakuma. He worked for the Associated Press for 30 years. He does not work there anymore because his job went away, because Instagram did away with his job.

You know what's funny about that? I was at a tattoo artist the other day and he told me— I was getting a tattoo and I was talking to him about Instagram and he said, I hated social media, I had no interest in any of those things. For him, Instagram transformed his model because now he gets to show off that he was that talented. He was afraid originally, just like everybody, that people were going to rip off his designs and rip off all of his things, but then he realized that the overall quality— I think here's actually a good segue why I don't think either one of these apps replace Snapchat, but why all of a sudden in the last 2 months I fell in love with Snapchat. I can honestly admit it was an app that as much as my fear of missing out exists, It was one I got on, wasn't too sold, but the idea that we live in an ADHD world where we're always disconnected, we're always thousands of things going on, I'm a great example of that. The fact that they have to have controlled attention on Snapchat, and you have to have your finger on the button and it disappears, and I'll give a shout out to Cyberdust as well. I actually was promoting this event through Cyberdust, so if anybody came to this event through Cyberdust, make sure you let us know in the hashtag, because I'd be curious who kind of ventured in here from Cyberdust. But that ability to, uh, you know, control— and that idea of control, but be able to hold someone's attention is important. And I think it's also important when we're talking about these apps, because let's, let's not forget, we're still in the early days of Meerkat and Periscope, and right now people are jumping on because it's that shock video. But yet, ultimately, if you're not providing value, if you're not investing in the time you're putting in here, people are going to give up and not watch your stuff.

Well, and you just made a great point, and another point about why I hate these apps. Most people's content sucks. I read thousands of people every day on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+. Good luck. And I guarantee you, I've read so many people's content that only 0.1% are really that good on a consistent basis. You know, every once in a while people get lucky with a building burning down across the street or something like that, and all of a sudden they become interesting. And then they just don't provide good content. Maybe I should turn the camera to Facebook so you can see just how bad most people are at this game. But there are some people who do good content. It's just really hard to find on these things, and in part because they didn't— they're immature. In 10 years, they're going to use the social signals and the sentiment that people are providing in the comments and the likes. This is one thing I like about Periscope. People like click on the screen if you're doing something really interesting and all these likes spray up the screen, right, all these hearts. And that content could be used by a machine learning system to say, oh my God, this girl has a really interesting piece of content right now, and push that up to the top. There's nothing that exists like that right now.

Well, especially because I think a lot of us quote Robert, we quote yourself or we quote Gary Vaynerchuk And you guys have a great luxury. Not only have you built up an amazing audience, but you care about your community. But I think one of the also concerns is not only discovery of great content, but how do you get your great content found? You know, I see a lot of comments coming down on both Periscope and Meerkat that people are like, hey, if I'm really trying to focus on great content, how do I get that great content found? Because I think that is a struggle for a lot of people. And I think until discovery improves, until some of these other aspects improve, we are going to be limited. on how people truly are able to stand out from the noise.

I know we can keep you guys going, but real quick, I want to make sure that we're answering questions from the audience because we promised them that.

Scrappy Doo just said on my channel that this is why it will never compete with mainstream media, and I disagree with that. But we do need new discovery mechanisms to find the really interesting content in real time, and right now We do not have that.

So one question I have, and once again guys on the stream, I'm kind of paraphrasing right now to see if we can turn the conversation a little bit because I love them. We're talking to 2 kind of, I always hesitate to use the word disruptors, right. We're talking to 2, both of you guys are cutting edge on tech, kind of have all the latest gizmos, you have no idea how jealous I am with that, right? But there's another side to this too, right? I'm a social strategist. I work with Peer Matter. The cool stuff that I do is dependent on our contracts. So I wait for a brand who is loving a tech and lets me build a strategy where I can actually make use of it. So we kind of have 2 different tensions here coming, right? So on the one hand, we have looking at these live video apps and the impact they have on our infrastructure, on Wi-Fi, on developing video, all of that. Couldn't agree more. But then on the other hand, as we know, I mean, one of the ways that Twitter kind of jumped forward was brands started to adopt it. I know we can have a debate on that, I'm sure, but we definitely got larger audiences. So if we're going to have live video here, it seems that there needs to be some way of assuring brands, assuring them that this is something that is safe for them to use. I know we dismiss the idea of copyright or ownership and all of that, but it does seem like there needs to be— what do you both think in terms of assuring brands that this can be used and that their legal department— kind of getting them over this hurdle so that we can get some really great And related to that, are there some brands who are just hitting it out of the park? And, you know, I know some are. Long question, transition question, go.

No, I love it. So for me, you know, so for me, this is an interesting one. My first answer is they should hire me because I am a change evangelist and I will teach them how to embrace change. But I think it comes down— I use this in all of my speeches, you know, trust, training, and tools, and in that order. And if your culture doesn't have trust and training to begin with, You're not going to be able to implement an awesome tool like this. And Hootsuite, I give credit to Hootsuite because, and I was very honest, full disclosure, Matt from Hootsuite sent me the memo they sent out to their entire team. And you know what they did? They broke down all of the guidelines, how to use it, gave them training, they trusted them, and then they gave them access to the Periscope account. And they said, go forth. And you know what? They turned out amazing content that can be used for recruiting. So I think the element comes down to this is, You can't— and this is something that I laugh about— you can't claim to want a Periscope or Meerkat strategy or philosophy if your company still blocks Google Hangouts. You need to change your philosophy and strategy as a whole before you embrace this trust and also allow people to fail. I think that's just kind of my stance on that.

Love that, love that, Danza.

I know when I worked at Microsoft, we set up training for people to understand the risks of social media. We even had the program called Don't Be Stupid, you know, because there are risks for public company employees. If you talk about stock price, you can get into trouble. If you talk about information that hasn't been patented yet, you can get into trouble. And there's a whole range of things you can do to get yourself into trouble. And it comes down to a little bit of training and then a little bit of empowerment and a little bit of risk-taking behavior on behalf of the company.

And remember, you know, companies forget, I think, you know, when we're talking about cybersecurity, right, that's a huge risk right now. The number one threat for cybersecurity is not China, it is internal, it is insider threat is what it's called, and it's your employees either accidentally or on purpose sharing your IP, giving access to your Wi-Fi, and it's the same with these tools. You can't really fix stupid or stop some employees that are going to adamantly do something bad, but you can mitigate the risk by training them correctly and giving them swim lanes. I think the brands that are doing it great, to your point, Suzy, MasterCard has done an amazing job of streaming things. Applebee's, one of my friends, Vincenzo Landino, he had just Jason Derulo in New York Times Square interviewing him, sponsored by Applebee's, on the Applebee's account, talking about Applebee's things. Mashable is giving it to all of their different authors and letting them kind of give the insights onto what they're hearing for news. I think you can't claim that you want this if you're not willing to trust and be willing sometimes to have mistakes, hopefully not as bad as like a US Air tweet, but let's keep that in mind.

I think we're getting off of the debate here. In my first book though, just to wrap it up, in my first book I wrote about corporate blogging when I worked at Microsoft, and we had a chapter in there about people who had gotten fired, and there was one commonality between all the people who got fired and most of them since. They didn't know they were breaking the rules. And so if you don't know the rules and you're on social media, and the rules change for every company, right? Google had different rules than Microsoft, has different rules than Rackspace, has different rules than Facebook. If you don't know the rules, you're in risk. And so if you haven't talked to a professional in your PR department or a lawyer to understand where you're taking risk with the brand, then you should learn the rules before you get on social media. At Apple, you're not allowed to be on any social media representing Apple, right? So if you don't know that rule, you're going to get fired. Now at BratSpace, I have a different set of rules, and if I don't know the rules, I'm going to get fired. Because there's a reason you get fired. Because when you walk into your boss's office and she says, you know what, you did something stupid on social media, if you say, well, I did it for these reasons and this is what's going to happen and this is the risk and consequences that I thought about, it's really hard to fire you because you thought about it. But if you say, I didn't know that was against the rules, well, you're stupid and you're out.

Yeah, I don't think— I don't know, is a piss-poor excuse these days. You know, and I even give that to brands who'd say, I don't know if my customers even want live streaming content. Well, you will know if you just listened and you actually cared enough to get out there. But no, I agree with you, Robert, on that point.

So I would push back actually, because I would say, I've, you know, I've worked with some brands. I've worked— we worked with a biotech company, for example, right, that was definitely about, you know, many years Behind, and we're still putting together their, you know, their social policies in place. And in a lot of these companies, we're dealing with a leadership issue. And so one, I would say that that's key, right? Because if you're saying it's the onus is on the employees, well, you need to make sure that you have your stuff up top in place first.

Now, you're misunderstanding me.

Please clarify.

If you don't understand the rules and if your leadership is in chaos and stupid and has its head stuck in the sand, I would not be posting on behalf of that brand in social world. I would be taking too much risk with my career. You can take risk. I took risk with my career, even at Microsoft. I told Steve Ballmer he was an asshole in public, right, and I was working there at the time. But I did that knowing the risk that I could get fired, and I did it for a very specific reason, because he was being a jerk, and he ended up apologizing in public as well to that— to what I was talking about, which was a gay rights bill. But if you don't work for rational employees, don't— or leadership, know the rules before you're posting on social media. That's on you. I agree. And if you don't know that before you start posting and you get fired because you pissed somebody off above you, that's on you.

No, yeah, I agree. And my friend, our friend Mitch Jackson just jumped on Periscope and just said a new mindset needs to be employed across the board, and I agree. And Mitch is a lawyer out there in California and great guy, and I love how he's embracing social. I think it all is a mindset of change, and that was the panel that I was on at South by Southwest was the future of the change agent and really this ability to either empower them and let them help make your company make a difference, or you shun them, fire them, and your company will live in the dark age and soon not have any internal employees to worry about a change agent.

So last question I want to put out there, as you know, this is an H2H chat, so one thing we definitely value is really thinking about this from the human perspective. So I'd like to just throw out a quick question to both of you guys. Live video streaming, are we seeing that this is kind of adding up, accentuating the ability to be human on social, taking it to a level that we haven't seen before? Go.

I'll let you go, Robert. Age before beauty.

Rephrase the question again. This is a new world for sure.

Yeah.

And it's a new world because we have Twitter. 10 years ago when I started blogging, the audience sizes were very small, fewer than 10,000 people were watching blogs. The ability to live talk was just not there, we didn't have Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn and Google+ and Snapchat. And we didn't have mobile phones where we could walk around the world and see things happening like buildings burning up and stuff like that. So this is a new world that we're playing with, and new stars are being born on these things. And we're going to see even more come out in the future as they add on some of these features that we're asking for, particularly recording, because I think recording is going to unlock the content that really is being developed here. And there is some good content here. But it needs to be recorded. This world of everything needs to be like Snapchat and go away, I really reject that wholeheartedly.

So you would say that the live video that we're seeing now is turning this, is dialing this up a notch?

I think so, because people around the world can add— the thing I really like is that you can add That you can add on to the conversation in real time. And my— one thing I've always learned ever since blogging started is my audience is smarter than I am. They're richer than I am, they're more connected than I am, they're more educated than I am, and they're probably much more knowledgeable on the topic than I am, even though I might know something. Like today I'm going to Flipboard I know something about Flipboard, I've been there ever since the beginning, but when you connect the world, the audience is smarter than I am even there and knows things that I don't know. And if they ask a good question, it adds on to the media, the content that I'm developing becomes much, much stronger. So yeah, this is really exciting times.

Awesome, you're going to Flipboard, so I should send you an email, a couple of my feature enhancements. I sent them an email about 2 weeks ago. I love Flipboard, by the way, I'm a huge Content creation guy. But for me, the human aspect here is, you know, I truly believe the future of business is community, and it's how you relate with the community, but it's also how you empower and connect with them. And today we have the ability to share our story, be our own promoter, our own marketer, our own advertiser in a way we never could before. And the storytelling aspect is powerful. And here's the cool thing, I was never a great blogger because I always wrote like I talked, which is sporadic and run-on and sometimes fast, but for me, the ability to jump into podcasting, into live video blogs, live streaming, I'm able to do Google Hangouts, I'm able to tell my story, relate with audiences, I'm able to reach out on Facebook, connect with Robert, Bryan reaches out and connects the dots and gets us on this Hangout, and that's that human aspect. And you know what, here's just a quick one on that, you know, I was very lucky, Ted Rubin, a friend, of course everyone on here knows that. He's the one that gave me the shirt, Be Good to People. But I went back and looked. I wrote a story, I'm writing a blog post today on the ROI of a tweet, because 4 years ago I sent him one tweet about his book, and this past weekend he's hanging out with my daughters here in Arizona, and they're calling him Uncle Ted. And to me, that's the power of social, right? The relationship started, and I think when we look at these new mediums, we can't look at them and say, what's this new tech? I think we have to look at it and say, how can I tell my story? How can I leverage this to relate with my audience? And I, I mean, I love it. I— the amount of opportunities that I've been able to be fortunate because of these apps is kind of crazy, because I'm out there, I'm on every medium that exists trying to make my name, and just the ability to have a new audience, a new path to tell my story, share my passion, has opened up a whole lot more doors. And I think that's the human aspect. I don't need more followers, I want more opportunities to build more relationships and grow my community.

Yeah.

So guys, we've got, uh, 5 minutes left.

One thing, by the way, my stream has dropped twice in this call on Meerkat. So has mine. Mine's dropped twice as well. And not on Google Hangout. When I met with the Google Hangout team, they said that their core advantage in the world is all the fiber that Google owns around the world. He said, we can get a packet to India faster than the phone company. We're seeing evidence of that right here, that Google has a global network of fiber that is unparalleled and makes this much more reliable, even as it makes it less fun because it's not built around mobile where Meerkat is built around mobile.

So we've got 5 minutes left, let's take, um, 2 and a half minutes each and go back to the topic of this, um, of this, uh, uh, chat here, debating the fate of Meerkat and Periscope. What is the fate, what is going to happen, what is the future, what are your predictions for, uh, video streaming, and if you want to get specific, Meerkat Robert, you want to go first?

Yeah, if Meerkat does close a major deal with Facebook, and that's a big if, and if Meerkat can figure out a way to deal with Facebook's filtering system, Meerkat is going to be 10 times bigger than Periscope and much more important. Every audience I speak in front of, I ask who's on Facebook or Twitter or Google+. And nearly every person in the audience always says Facebook. 70% of my audiences are on Twitter, and that's pretty high compared to most of the market share it has, but everybody's on Facebook. And so if Meerkat can land Facebook and can figure out a way, maybe using scheduling, to get around Facebook's filtering system, Meerkat is going to be a major winner. But does Facebook have not invented here syndrome, and is Facebook going to build its own live streaming platform? If it does, I don't see a good future for Meerkat. I see a good future for Periscope because it's in Twitter, and I see something's going to happen on Facebook eventually, but they need to land that deal with Facebook to stick around long-term.

No, I love it. Spoken like a true Facebook evangelist there, Robert. Like I said, I give you credit for reinventing my Facebook love as of recently. I agree.

I'm an audience whore. I go where the audiences go.

Actually, I'm going to take that right there. You go where the audiences go, and I love that. I think that's the future of these apps. One of the things for me is I'm a big fan of competition. driving faster innovation, which ultimately only benefits us, the users, because we get features better. I truly believe that if Android was not out there, we would be stuck just getting copy and paste on our iPhones today, right? They held that out for us for so long, and if it wasn't for competition, we might not have had that. And that might be extreme, but I truly feel that the competition is something that instead of Periscope, uh, users bashing— I think the big boy play is the wrong angle. If you come out cutting out the meerkat legs and coming out telling your influencers, telling your people to say, hey, you have to use Periscope, I think all that does is ignite the Meerkat side of it. And I think Meerkat's true advantage is their API, their ability to fail fast. I mean, I'm using their beta right now, and they're testing out a picture-in-picture option that a lot of other— that I don't think Periscope would embrace for a while. But at the same time, I think connecting with an audience like Facebook would be a major advantage. I've also said if they could actually embed this in Google Hangouts, that would be nice. But for me, the fate is a lot less on the future of these apps. I believe the future of mobile live broadcasting is going to extremely grow because video is going to be the future of the internet.

I totally agree. One insight about Twitter though, to be fair to Twitter, Meerkat was spamming the heck out of Twitter, and they are resistant against spam. Facebook is even more resistant against spam. That's why they turned on filtering. And by the way, filtering was a hugely contentious feature inside Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg decided to go with filtering. I think that was one of the most brilliant decisions he's made. It still is a very controversial feature, particularly with marketers who believe that everything should be seen.

Well, hopefully Twitter doesn't do the same, because I love Facebook now because of that dynamic feed, but I don't need 2 Facebooks. I love the fire hose on Twitter, and I think Twitter— I mean, I've said that everywhere— the reason Twitter is my favorite platform for real-time engagement to grow my audience. Facebook is where I go to engage with all the people I've built great relationships and have dynamic conversations. And even my blog post that goes live today says how Facebook is now my professional and career home, even more so than LinkedIn. It might surprise people because of the amount of engagement that I have on Facebook. But I still think we have to kind of remember these apps. I think it's Meerkat and Periscope as well. I mean, I think it's, you know, understand each other's features, understand their benefits, but Twitter does not need to be another Facebook. We don't need another dynamically searched thing. Twitter needs to fix their newbie to power user feature. They need to fix their element of onboarding and turning people in from lurkers to tweeters. That's where their big win will be. Unfortunately, right now it seems like they're too worried about what other social networks are doing well. All right, guys.

We're going to have to cut things short here. We're right on— or not cut it short, but we're right at 10 AM. Keep

it going, keep it going! I'm

glad we don't talk a

lot.

I'll tell you what, is there any final thoughts? Robert, any last thought that you want to give?

I think I've had my say. This stuff is exciting but immature, particularly for professional content people who are really trying to build a sizable audience and build a new media interaction, but there are people who are doing it. It's just they're gonna be hard to find by the mainstream for a while until they figure out these discovery features and the recording features. If they can solve those 2 problems, watch these stars go from a few thousand viewers per show to hundreds of thousands of viewers per show, because there's some stars out there who are doing some amazing content.

And I'll end it with, first, thanks Bryan for putting this together. I guess I want to give a shout out, and Robert, I don't think I've told you face to face, but eyeball to eyeball, I built my last role at I/O. Yeah, there you go, eyeballs to eyeballs. I actually built my last role after you and Guy Kawasaki, the idea of the evangelist, and you kind of paving the way for what I believe the tech change agent, being able to have your voice and be trusted by a brand, but also not be polluted by those that are trying to kind of distill what your voice and opinion is. I just wanted to say thank you for paving the way and doing what you do because it's inspired me to take the path that I have. It's truly an honor to debate a topic like this. I couldn't have done it, Bryan, without you organizing the brainwave. I truly do appreciate it.

You got it. I got to end this just by thanking our sponsors. Otherwise, we wouldn't have as fruitful a show. Thank you to Newstar, IBM, Cisco, MasterCard, Cox Communications, Freshdesk, Mutual Mind, Influitive, Hootsuite, and Speakeasy. And then Susie, thank you as well for pulling the questions, guarding the tweets, and popping in and out and being a great co-host. And to you guys out there who watched this today, I really appreciate it. We're going to be back again next Monday. We've got a great lineup for the next few Mondays, very exciting. Check back in.

Thank you.

And then Robert and Bryan, Cheers, guys.

Thanks for having me on. It's been a fun one, and it's going to be one that I think we're going to argue about for 3 or 4 years. Awesome.

I think so, too. All right, take care.