Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin recently sent an email to the company's investors to inform them the livestreaming app is failing. The email explained that the company started last year on a "high note," but the situation became worse during the year because mobile broadcast video did not become as popular as the company had hoped. Tech rivals including Twitter and Facebook had more early users and Meerkat was unable to grow as fast.

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The email pointed out two big issues. One is that the livestreaming business is not a big hit yet, and it is difficult to compete with popular social networks offering the same product including Twitter and Facebook.

This has caused the company to shift its focus. Rubin told Re/code in an interview that Meerkat will become a social network where every user is always live.

Rubin explained it was very difficult to explain the livestreaming video feature would not work, and thank people for their support, according to Re/Code. The live broadcasting is just one feature of a platform but the company must make big changes if it wants to be independent.  

Last year Meerkat was launched just weeks before the South by Southwest (SXSW) media and tech festivals and conferences. It is the same event that helped launch microblogging service Twitter nearly one decade earlier.

Rubin explained that March 2015 was an extraordinary time for the live-streaming Meerkat app. He shares he did not sleep or eat for 72 hours of the event.    

In the weeks following SXSW 2015 the startup company raised $12 million in funding from various venture capital (VC) firms.

However, Twitter cut Meerkat's access to its social graph and chose its Periscope livestream service instead. This made it more difficult for Meerkat fans to find people to follow when using the mobile app.

Rubin claims that Meerkat's number of viewers continues to grow. The number of broadcasters peaked in May 2015 at about 100,000 people, but the figure did not increase even though the app teamed up with GoPro in July.   

As of March 4, Friday Periscope was ranked No. 8 on iOS and No. 12 on Android in the social app category. Meanwhile, Meerkat was ranked 368 and 430 in respective ranks, according to Quartz.