Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming app, has played around in the outskirts of Twitter, with nothing more than a screenshot and link being shared when you see a stream pop up in your timeline. That changes today as Periscope gets fully baked into the iOS version of Twitter and coming soon for Android and web.
You might be asking “what took so long?” but since Periscope works independently from Twitter it took the two engineering teams to work together for this integration. It works as you’d expect, if you come upon a live or recorded Periscope stream in your feed, it’ll start autoplaying and you can tap into a mini-Periscope experience without leaving the Twitter app:
After you update the Twitter iOS app, give this string a search to get an idea of how much life live streaming breathes into your feed. Until now, basic Twitter Cards were shown and you had to click out of the app into Periscope. Now no Periscope account (or installed app) is needed to view the streams on your iPhone. The company also announced that 100M broadcasts have been started using Periscope since its launch last year.
I spoke to Sara Haider and Aaron Wasserman from Periscope, who led the way on the Periscope side, and both agreed that this meets a lot of needs for current Scopers, namely getting their feeds in front of millions of eyeballs they previously didn’t have access to.
Haider reinforced why Periscope and Twitter are snug fits, noting “Both are ways to see what’s going on the world right now.”
https://twitter.com/periscopeco/status/686880541224775681
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Here’s what Periscope’s CEO, Kayvon Beykpour, had to say about the launch in a blog post:
Both Twitter and Periscope show you what’s going on in the world, right now — whether that’s outside your window or across the globe. Since Periscope launched last year, people have created over 100 million live broadcasts. Today, we’re making it easier to see what’s happening by bringing Periscope broadcasts — both live and replays — directly into Tweets.
To put the final touches on the integration and ship it, Periscope embarked on the always-fun-all-nighter:
@periscopetv @a_wass @jonah @kayvz @lilisalzberg can someone bring coffee upstairs plz
— sara beykpour (@pandemona) January 12, 2016
current status (credit @suyash) pic.twitter.com/rN5K5fvaf7
— sara beykpour (@pandemona) January 12, 2016
The hope, Haider and Wasserman tell me, is that there will be a whole new flow of conversation around the live broadcasts already happening on the Periscope platform. Wasserman describes Periscope streams as “Different, it’s unedited” which is also a charming calling card for Twitter. It will be interesting to see other ways the two products can leverage one another as time goes on.
