Twitter Announces its Own Livestreaming App, Periscope

Until today, Twitter has been relying on Meerkat as their users' livestream app. That has just changed, Twitter removed Meerkat's access from their social graph and announced their own app that can help users broadcast live events that at the same time offers more features functions than the other app. Twitter unveiled the Periscope.

To give you a little background, Periscope is actually not developed by Twitter from the ground up. This app had been in development for more than a year which is founded by Kayvon Beykpour its CEO and co-founded with Joe Bernstein. Twitter purchased the app earlier this year for a reported sum of $100 million.

Meerkat has been so popular and if you have been using it you may ask why would you switch to this new player Periscope? I think I can give you two good answers, one it is because it is owned by Twitter so having the risk of being axed due to some unknown reasons is very-very low compared to other competition and two it is because unlike Meerkat where live videos are gone as soon as you end broadcasting, in Periscope your livestream videos are autosaved and your followers will have an option to play them back at a later time. What do you think?

Once you approv the app and sync it with your Twitter app or account, you will immediately see list of current livestreams of the people you follow on Twitter (of course if they use the app too) and other users' videos too, or you can right away start doing your own live broadcast with just a tap. One of the authorizations required by Periscope is to have access to your front and rear cameras, that also means that you can use both cameras when you start livestreaming to your friends. To switch between cameras, you can simply double tap the screen.

Other nice things about the Periscrope is that viewers can interact with the broadcaster through commenting and sending hearts. To send heart or hearts, viewers can just tap the screen once, tap it twice to send multiple animated hearts. Hearts work the same way as Likes on Facebook and Favorites on Twitter. The more hearts a stream gets the higher it will rank in the "Most Loved" section of the app.

When you start broadcasting your followers will get notifications and they can start viewing your content within the app or via web browsers. You can also set an invite-only viewing sessions with select people or followers you prefer. As I have already mentioned, viewers can comment and send hearts, now when users playback a saved stream those comments and hearts will also playback as they watch the video as if users are watching it live.


While also within the app the Periscope team will curate livestreams for you that they think will interest you as well as people you may follow.For now users won't be able to launch Periscope from within the Twitter app, it works like a separate app.

Periscope app is currently available for iOS users. But don't worry Android peeps, a version for us will eventually come. We just have to wait for it.

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