It's unclear how, exactly, Meerkat's new strategy will work. But Recode notes that it sounds similar to traditional video conferencing apps like Skype and Google Hangouts. It'll likely be more about chatting with your friends, rather than the entire world.

Meerkat's big problem over the past year, according to its founder Ben Rubin, was that it simply couldn't get users to stick around and continue streaming. That might also be an issue for Periscope and Facebook Live moving forward, but at least those services have the benefit of large social graphs of their very own.