How Meerkat is Going to Change the 2016 Election for Every Campaign, Reporter and Voter
Every few minutes over the last few days, my phone vibrates with another notification that another person I follow on Twitter has joined Meerkat. Everywhere I have gone here at South by Southwest, from the convention center to the food trucks, people are talking about Meerkat. And if that same discussion is not happening at every media outlet and presidential campaign around the country, they are making a huge mistake.
If 2004 was about Meetup, 2008 was about Facebook, and 2012 was about Twitter, 2016 is going to be about Meerkat (or something just like it).
Now admittedly, no one seems to know how to use the thing yet. Most of what I have seen thus far is either jumpy streaming of events or uncomfortably awkward reporters talking to their followers. Meerkat has also hit a bump in the road with Twitter cutting off access to their Social Graph. But whether it is Meerkat, Periscope or someone else, the potential for a service that makes livestreaming this easy is limitless. It could do to television what blogs did to newspapers by removing many of the financial and structural advantages of legacy media institutions.
Think about it this way: Up until about two weeks ago, broadcasting an event live required a large and quite expensive satellite truck, a ton of expensive cables and expensive satellite time. Now you can do it with your phone — the same machine you use to text, check Instagram, hail an Uber, and play Candy Crush.
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https://medium.com/backchannel/how-meerkat-is-going-to-change-the-2016-election-for-every-campaign-reporter-and-voter-1daa8954e543
Rachel Maddow was talking about this last night. There is an assumption by her and this article that people will want to watch the 2016 race live while it's happening. I'm not sure campaigns work like that most of the time. We're in an "on demand" world. The benefit won't be the live coverage for most events. It will be access to a few more events that were previously inaccessible live.
I don't think it's presidential campaigns that have to worry much about live streams. It's smaller and more localized events like local campaigns, protests, meetings, etc. We've seen this already with Ustreams of OWS marches, and recent civil rights marches. Now anyone with a cell phone can be a cameraman.
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They can't use campaign footage (except what the campaign makes generally available) because it's coordinating their efforts with a campaign and we all know they never, ever do that because it's illegal. 
But if there's a ton of streaming video to sort though? A lot of it will be shaky garbage but some of it will be usable.
Bobcat... Which turned into bobcat goldthwait. So I thought this thread was going to be something! 