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With Twitter ( TWTR ) striving to boost its Periscope live-video streaming service, Facebook ( FB ) must prepare for plenty of competition in the live video streaming segment, wrote Monness Crespi Hardt analyst James Cakmak in an industry note on Monday. One trailblazer has already tossed in the towel, the investment bank said. While live video first grabbed mainstream attention with the meteoric rise of privately held trailblazer Meerkat during the South By Southwest music festival in Texas last year, “Meerkat is now officially pivoting away from live and into social — or, said another way, giving up on live due to competition,” wrote Cakmak. While not a brand new phenomenon, video streamed live remains a “niche” service, said Cakmak. “We expect to see significantly more attention from companies and investors placed on this category as the utility becomes more apparent to mid- and late-stage adopters,” he said. Another indicator of growing attention to the profit potential of live video includes Facebook’s recent rollout of its Facebook Live video streaming service to devices running on Alphabet ( GOOGL )-owned Google Android and throughout more international markets, Cakmak said. Twitter is also working to better integrate content from its Periscope service into the Twitter news feed, he said. “Given the company’s new identity around (live video), we expect marketing dollars to be put toward this in contrast with Facebook’s largely organic effort,” according to Cakmak. Meanwhile, Meerkat’s strategy change makes it “increasingly clear that between Facebook-owned Snapchat’s utilization and more resources being allocated to Facebook Live and Periscope, we expect attention in this category to only escalate from here,” he said. The recent $175 million funding round of privately held Snapchat, which has 8 billion daily views, will also open up “floodgates” in driving live content and consumption, Cakmak said. Total spending on digital video ads in the U.S. alone is projected to jump by two-thirds to $12.8 billion in 2018 from $7.7 billion this year, according to research group eMarketer. Twitter stock was up a fraction in afternoon trading in the stock market today , near 19. It brushed an all-time low of 13.91 last month. Facebook stock and Alphabet stock were each down more than 1% in afternoon trading. Image provided by Shutterstock . Scalper1 News
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