Katch

» see katch.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

katch's peak year overlaps with a stretch of internet history i was watching from the outside. march 2015 was sxsw and meerkat. a fortnight later twitter announced periscope, and for about eight months the livestream question felt like the next big thing. by then i was thirty one in ankara on twitter, seeing periscope links land in my feed but never opening the app. katch sat behind both livestream tools as a save-button utility, and it went dark 4 may 2016 before either parent product had fully collapsed.

it started as a two-day hack. tarikh korula and the team at seen.co, a hashtag-ranking service, put together a small tool called katchkats during the meerkat surge in march 2015. add the hashtag #katch to your meerkat stream title and the service would grab the video and post it to youtube automatically. meerkat itself did not have a save function then. periscope launched with replays but only for twenty four hours.

what happened next was that seen.co pivoted the whole company. by summer 2015 katch was the flagship. reception was strong enough that ben rubin at meerkat publicly supported it, which is a rare stance for a platform to take toward a third-party utility that ultimately reduces its retention. the product served, in the founders' shutdown language, decades of video to 1.3 million monthly active users.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it did ~

mechanically it was small. katch listened for the hashtag in a stream title on either meerkat or periscope. when it saw one, it pulled the raw video after the stream ended and reuploaded it to a katch-branded youtube channel with a link back to the streamer's profile. later versions let you attach your own youtube account, which is what made the utility genuinely useful for creators who wanted archives.

the ceiling was structural. periscope shipped a permanent replay feature by mid-2015, then eventually infinite replays. facebook live launched in august 2015 with a save-by-default model. meerkat pivoted away from public streaming toward video chat in march 2016 and rebranded as houseparty the same year. every one of katch's dependencies was either building the feature natively or leaving the category.

~ the day it died ~

the shutdown notice went out around 21 april 2016. users had two weeks to export their saved streams. on 4 may 2016 the katch.me service stopped taking new saves. the language of the shutdown post was measured. after twelve months of building the best way to save and discover mobile live streams, the founders were moving on. the seen.co brand later wound down as well.

this was one of those small deaths that only mattered inside a very short window. by september 2016 meerkat itself was gone from the app store, which meant a good part of the streams katch had saved were now the only surviving trace of that entire mobile livestream moment.

~ what got buried with it ~

the archive was the thing. katch had reuploaded a large chunk of sxsw 2015 and the summer 2015 twitter livestream window to youtube, which was where a lot of the early meerkat-and-periscope cultural memory actually lived. when the katch youtube channels stopped being maintained, orphaned videos went private or got pulled over the following year. archive-team-style captures exist for some of it. most of it does not.

what katch demonstrated cleanly was that livestream utilities live and die on the platforms they attach to. add-on tools cannot outlast the host. by mid-2016 the whole mobile livestream category had cooled anyway, and the save-button for it was one of the earliest signals.

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