Live streaming on Twitter is hitting a kind of fever pitch, effectively kickstarted by the sudden success of the video streaming app Meerkat after its debut at the South by Southwest Interactive conference earlier this month.

Meerkat relies on Twitter as a base platform, which means that it doesn’t really work on its own or anywhere else. Nonetheless, its immediate surge in popularity caused Twitter developers to start scrambling for an answer of their own. Well, now they have one, and it’s called Periscope.

At the fundamental level, both apps work the same way, which is by streaming live video and audio from a user’s phone, and then tweeting a link to the stream in order to round people up and get them watching. The interesting thing is, Periscope is actually more independent than Meerkat, keeping all engagement and functionality in the Periscope app itself, rather than defaulting to Twitter for most actions. In this way, Periscope is more of a stand-alone app than Meerkat, and could easily outshine it.

The reason for this, says Periscope co-founder Kayvon Beykpour, is that Twitter is wary of transforming itself too much. “It’s really hard to change people’s perception of what a product is after it’s been around for seven-plus years,” he explained. “Though other features deserve to exist within Twitter, I don’t think that’s the right way to launch a new experience that we think is special.”

So, which one do you think will end up winning out: the already popular but bare-bones Meerkat, or the polished but untested Periscope?

Thanks to Re/code for the information!