The annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas offers a good indication as to where technology is heading - and at this year's festival addictive live-streaming apps were the talk of the town.

Meerkat has been the early leader in this growing market - but it is now facing a major speed bump since Twitter announced during the festival that it would no longer allow you to automatically connect to your Twitter account to sync who you follow.

Techcrunch takes a tour of the app

Twitter made that decision public days after it revealed that it had bought Meerkat's rival Periscope - which it launched on IOS today.

Writing for Mashable, Lance Ulanoff describes the functionality of Twitter's new app as being "virtually the same" as Meerkat's. Without using already existing contacts Meerkat faces a tough task to grow a mass-active user community.

Comments run in the corner of the video feed in real-time - and you can press a 'heart' button to show your appreciation if you like what you see.

Videos can be saved for 12 hours - they then disappear. There is also an option to save videos to your phone. Once you are broadcasting you can track how many people are watching.

The app's co-founder Kayvon Beykpour has said that he was inspired to pursue the project after traveling through Turkey during the Arab Uprising.

He says that he started thinking: "It should be possible to use your phone to give you a visual periscope into the world."

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey had a similar thought when we was on the ground during the protests following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in November of last year.

He says that he was frustrated trying to capture what was happening by tweeting six second vines.

If you're looking to download #periscope in Ireland, it's not in App Store search yet. This link works on mobile: https://t.co/xZW2W5SBc3

— Dave Molloy (@davemolloy) March 26, 2015

Live-streaming platforms like Ustream have built their own following - but Periscope and Meerkat offer a new social dimension - and Twitter's integration with Periscope offers the app a real advantage in the battle to become the 'go-to' app in this growing market.

Twitter says that the data-usage is similar to that of apps like Facetime. Periscope is available now on IOS - and an Andriod version is on the way.