Meerkat dives into embedded streaming on Discovery's Shark Week

NEW YORK — Meerkat is getting ready to swim with the sharks.

Up to now, the live-streaming app that made all kinds of waves at the SxSW conference in March did not provide a feature that let broadcasters embed streams into their own website or blog.

On Friday, Meerkat unveiled just such functionality in the form of an embeddable player, with Discovery Channel set to debut the feature in conjunction with the cultural feeding frenzy around Discovery's popular Shark Week.

During Meerkat streams embedded on SharkWeek.com, Discovery plans to have "Finbassador" educators, cinematographers, conservationists and other shark experts share parallel complementary stories to what's being broadcast on the network.

There's a stream planned around a live shark feeding from the National Aquarium in Baltimore. And Discovery plans to stream various parties and promotional events leading into Shark Week, which officially commences on air July 5.

Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin declined to take the bait when I asked him about the embed feature taking a bite out of his main live-streaming rival, Twitter-owned Periscope. In an email, Rubin said, "We just want to be the live=streaming button to everywhere and empower creators. The past month was our highest in traffic ever and we continue to watch the community grow. One of the ways to keep the momentum is empowering our users."

Discovery Communications Senior Vice President for Digital Media Conal Byrne is equally high on the collaboration: "This is huge for us," he said. Discovery's Shark Week streams will originate from Discovery's own Shark Week Meerkat account. But Byrne says, "We also want to pull together anyone who is Meerkat-ing around #sharkweek and promote that stuff back on Meerkat. It's push and pull."

Discovery does not plan to show any of the Meerkat content on its TV network, though it will use the channel to inform viewers about the complementary streams. Those streams will be event driven, rather than delivered 'round the clock.

If you miss a live stream you're likely out of luck since Meerkat, unlike Periscope, does not permit replays. "We believe that what makes this medium special is participation, and you can only participate in something if you are in it live," says Sima Sistani, vice president of media at Meekat.

Sistani added though that if Discovery wanted to download the streamed content and post it on YouTube or distribute it on other social platforms, the company would be free to do so.

According to Byrne, Meerkat and Discovery are not exchanging any dollars as part of the Shark Week collaboration. And Byrne is confident that Discovery will find other opportunities in which to exploit the embedded Meerkat player.

"Shark Week is our biggest testing ground where we're able to bring out the most cutting-edge stuff we do and put it in front of millions of people immediately. ... At the end of the day it gives super-fans what they want and hopefully creates a few new ones."

On its side, the affiliation with Shark Week should help Meerkat gain visibility.

The new embedded player is open to anyone on Meerkat. You go to meerkat.app.co/embed and enter your user name to get the code you'll need to embed your own stream.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow @edbaig on Twitter