Stre.am enters the live video streaming fray at SXSW

 

It’s funny how similar ideas come along from different places at the same time.
Just as Foursquare and Gowalla emerged the solve the same problem back in 2009, a crop of live mobile video streaming startups have been catching people’s attention of late. As well as Meerkat and the yet-to-launch Periscope (the acquisition of which Twitter confirmed today), Stre.am is a new app that has launched just in time for SXSW.
Combining live streams that can only be watched in-the-moment with Snapchat Stories-style saved clips that are available for 24 hours after publishing, Stre.am is a more complicated product than Meerkat, although the other interpretation is that it’s more fully-featured and is on potentially firmer ground by building a standalone social graph that doesn’t depend on Twitter.
Oh, and you can stream live from Android as well as iOS on Stre.am, which you can’t do with Meerkat yet. Still, with so much buzz around the latter right now (at least in the SXSW tech-obsessive bubble), feature lists aren’t the only thing that will decide a ‘winner’ in this market.
I caught up with Stre.am’s Eric Bowman to find out more about the app and why the startup brought its release forward for SXSW. You can listen to our chat below.

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