Video apps are becoming more and more popular these days, providing users with many ways to showcase what they’re doing with clips and live video feeds. Twitter, no stranger to sociality with its popular media-based site, intends to get in on this action with a newly launched video application called Periscope.
The app comes on the heels of Twitter’s acquisition of the site in a reported $100 million deal, and gives it access to a service that its millions of users are likely to latch onto, with live streaming support and other features, according to Variety.
“We think it’s a perfect complement to Twitter, which is why we acquired the company in January,” said vice president of product Kevin Well, in a blog post early today.
The app, which is available now for iOS devices through Apple’s iTunes store, allows users to create, edit and post videos up to 30 seconds in length, quintupling the time allowed for Vine videos (six seconds). With it, Twitter hopes to take on the popular Meerkat service, which launched last month to great success with its live broadcasting capability.
With Periscope, users simply need to push a button to activate live streaming, which in turn posts on their Twitter account that they’re broadcasting. “We wanted to create the closest thing to teleportation,” said the team in its recent blog post. “A picture may be worth a thousand words, but live video can take you some place and show you around.”
Twitter hasn’t figured out the financial side of Periscope just yet, as a business model wasn’t introduced at the time of the app’s launch. Big-name partners could be the golden ticket, as Meerkat currently has the likes of The Tonight Show‘s Jimmy Fallon, who uses the app to show what’s happening behind-the-scenes.
That said, the app could be a “positive game-changer for the company,” according to Rosenblatt Securities analyst Martin Pyykkonen. “Periscope enables live streaming video from mobile and other devices, which effectively can mean personalized live video content delivery over the Twitter platform. We think this could have profound implications for usage/engagement on Twitter and be one other challenge for traditional linear media delivery, as users would spend more time selectively watching live-streaming video from people and subjects that they follow as part of their Interest Graph.”
Early impressions from a number of users indicate that Periscope is very easy to use, and even “addictive” in some cases. But some believe that Meerkat will still take a lot to top, especially considering that it just landed $14 million in funding. David Pierce with Wired said, “Meerkat’s already caught on with some important people, and Periscope isn’t so obviously better that it will destroy the competition on impact. Especially not when the competition has a slight head start. For now, having both Periscope and Meerkat on your phone is easy enough, and as people continue to learn about live-streaming in general, each probably benefits from the other. But eventually, as the apps try to build larger and more exclusive social networks, it’s hard to imagine two live-streaming apps both winning out.”
We’ll see how well the app does over the next few months. For now, check out the sample clip below to see how effectively it works, per TechCrunch.
