Meerka stops offering video streaming apps

Meerkat has stopped offering its video streaming apps. The once popular service suffered a sharp decline in interest, and the makers have also shifted their attention to other services.

On his Twitter account, one of the company founders left Meerkat know that the software is no longer available on the Play Store for Android and the App Store for iOS. The Twitter account for Meerkat has also been taken offline, which means that support for the video streaming service appears to have officially ended.

Despite the sudden removal of the applications, the makers have shifted their attention to other software some time ago, co-founder Ben Rubin told TechCrunch. For example, Life on Air, the company behind Meerkat, is now mainly working on Houseparty, also an app for video communication. The intention is that a group of up to eight people can stream video together, when they are online together. By now, this service is said to have almost a million users.

The story behind Meerkat is remarkable. The software became incredibly popular in a short time last year after a lot of attention at the SXSW festival. Soon after, however, Meerkat faced competition from Periscope. The latter was acquired by Twitter, and was able to reach a wider audience through integration with the social networking site. After that, Meerkat quickly went downhill.

Earlier this year, Meerkat made another attempt at turning things around by turning the service into a social network. However, that turned out not to be a success.