I think this matchup between Meerkat and Periscope is completely and utterly fascinating.

Never before, at least that I can remember, has a new space been opened by two competing services in so short a time.

In such a scenario, one can help but wonder: who is winning? Well, here’s what I’m seeing.

Winning Overall
Let’s start with overall. While exact numbers are hard to come by, a hack-ish way to arrive at a similar number is simply by monitoring tweet volume as both services are built to push out live streams to the streamer’s followers on Twitter.

So, I did a search for each, waited 10 minutes, and then took screenshots of the “new results” that showed up in the interim.

In this case, Periscope streams outnumber Meerkat streams by about 3:1.

Winning with Resorts
Next I looked at resort tweets for the same stream links and found total number of such tweets from each platform. For resorts that number was 5:1 because…well…only five Periscope tweets existed versus the one I could find from Meerkat.

There are 17 resorts with Periscope accounts with Whistler’s 1,350 followers leading the way in terms of in-app reach (Mammoth seems to have used it the most and has 4,000+ “hearts”) but without Twitter’s graph inside Meerkat it’s hard to give apples-to-apples numbers.

Basic version, from what I can tell, is that adoption has been slow and resorts are still feeling it out.

Not One or the Other
But as some of you have heard me say, the idea that one or the other will win is a misnomer. The thing to watch, instead, is whether the concept itself wins. Whether live-streaming can and will work as a service and as a business. Whether phones, users, and bandwidth costs are ready for it.

If so, skiing’s future on these platforms looks to be full of live-streamed lift rides and perhaps even marketing meetings (transparency, live feedback).

Whatever the case, we can’t name a winner now and maybe never will, but with the highly visual nature of skiing, it’s one we need to keep an eye on.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.