Periscope by Twitter

I really like Periscope. It&#x27;s clean, fun, and there is a lot of potential, especially with their Twitter distribution. Tried it out this morning and it was really smooth.<p>Meerkat is great too, but clearly has an uphill battle for the next few months after the initial hype. They certainly have passionate initial fans though.<p>I&#x27;d be curious to see with Facebook&#x27;s dedication to video, especially highlighted at F8, if they would consider swooping up Meerkat right now and offer distribution through their ecosystems. This might just be me, but I have Twitter streaming all day, while I check Facebook maybe 2-3 times sporadically, so it might be a bit tougher to capture attention. But who knows, it will be really fascinating to watch.<p>I&#x27;m assuming Grelock, their recent series B lead, would not be interested in selling so soon after their investment for anything less than 2x. Post-valuation was $52M, probably a few buyers out there at that price but who knows(Full details on their Series B: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/9zOonad.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;9zOonad.png</a>)

I don&#x27;t like the message Twitter sends with the semi-walled garden. Maybe I&#x27;m completely wrong here, but this to me says &quot;develop on our platform and if you come up with a good idea and we like what you do we&#x27;ll just do it ourselves&quot;

In my opinion what Meerkat did wrong was not making relationship with Twitter. The reason why they got blocked are simple:<p>- v1 of Meerkat was posting on user&#x27;s behalf without permission, auto-follow @Meerkat on sign-up, sending Twitter notifications without permission.<p>- user&#x27;s social graph cannot be ported to the 3rd party apps<p>- recreating commenting network using Twitter&#x27;s API<p>This is why I am not surprised Twitter blocked them. They say: &quot;you don&#x27;t shit, where you eat&quot;.

Love the screenshot. &quot;Crazy sunset&quot;<p>Like there&#x27;s this great sunset, and you can&#x27;t enjoy it because you&#x27;re busy tweeting it. And there are a handful of others who can&#x27;t see the sunset because their looking down at their phones, receiving the tweet.

It&#x27;s weird how these app fads go. I used to work for a company in Charleston, SC that has been doing live streaming for almost a year now (<a href="http://stre.am/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stre.am&#x2F;</a>). They got some press out of SXSW, but without a voice in the Si Valley echo chamber, I suspect they&#x27;re going to get crowded out.

Looks like a lovely app, but I wonder why did they attempt to pollute the identity space with yet another username?!<p>Let me give you an example of how this can work against them, which is applicable to other startups.<p>Let&#x27;s say, you&#x27;re an early adopter and you got a nice Twitter username. Unfortunately, you&#x27;re in the Android camp (me!). So, a new service comes up and some guy gets lucky enough to &quot;steal&quot; your username. You will then feel alienated from that service, because it doesn&#x27;t solidify your identity. Same happened with Vine in the past.<p>What&#x27;s weird as these come out of a company that has invested so much into building a new identity as @username and now they are undermining their investment!<p>Same happened with Facebook. They launched Slingshot, which invented yet another identity nomenclature. Not that I care about Slingshot, but if I did, it would unconsciously boycott it.<p>I&#x27;m not talking about me personally (yeah, right!), but I&#x27;m just trying to think about possible scenarios.<p>A smart and not so hard to accomplish thing even for the mobile first crowd would be to at least allow account creation on the web. How hard could that be? This way early adopters will blame themselves, not the service, for not being so &quot;early&quot; in the game.<p>These are just some psychological aspects I wanted to share.

Compared to Meercat, there&#x27;s a better UI, more ways to explore users to find new content and not as much of a blank slate for new users. After using each less than 5 times, I sort of prefer periscope.

Think about why, in a world with LiveStream, UStream, &amp; YouTube Live Events, people see Meerkat as revolutionary. Also apply that question to Spotify vs Rhapsody.

This is a good time for Facebook&#x2F;Instagram to step up and buy Meerkat.<p>This is also a great time for Meerkat to sell. To anyone who&#x27;s willing to go above $50M.

No android version? At what market share does android have to be until companies do android first?

The only real, but extremely useful, use case I see for this is for uploading video while it&#x27;s being shot, because someone might take your phone away. For example, when filming the police, or filming any other disruptive &#x2F; conflict type of event.<p>What other reliable apps are there that can do this?

I&#x27;ve been seeing ads for an analytics app called periscope: <a href="https://www.periscope.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.periscope.io</a>. For a second, I thought it was them before clicking through. Poor periscope.io.

Just streamed what I&#x27;m currently working on... felt odd, like letting 14 people into my office, one guy even asked a question &quot;what are you coding?&quot;, it didn&#x27;t have a way to reply by text... which makes sense as you can be either streaming correctly or typing correctly, which is why once that happened the stream got extremely shaky, [sorry for that other viewers]<p>I think this has potential and it might take a unexpected turn once Carlos Danger gets the news

I run an Internet TV Station for Latin Indie Music Fans here in Austin (estereobit.tv), and one of the core services is live broadcasting, so these sort of apps interest me a lot.<p>I tried Meerkat during SXSW, but yeah, I&#x27;m switching to Periscope. I had users complaining about broken streams, and how they couldn&#x27;t get the video on time. This could have been due to internet traffic because it&#x27;s off the charts during SXSW; I&#x27;m not sure how it does on smaller events.<p>Reach worries me for sure. I don&#x27;t know the details of how that is going down with Twitter though. Another thing that worries me is that I can&#x27;t save videos. A good show can keep accumulating views forever so having that footage available is important.<p>Quality is also a big problem. In low-light settings and with loud music, it&#x27;s hard to get a good show with just the iPhone. I was thinking of investing in a good camera but I don&#x27;t know how that would work with these apps. Does anyone have any ideas on how could I get through this hurdle?

There was a Forbes article on HN about Chris Sacca yesterday, and he&#x27;s talking about it now - <a href="https://www.periscope.tv/w/VvV_yzk2fDY0OTI3wusAmiDk5lk8euhHxEvW1u1g7B3nhEOp4PpP9xhgHf8=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.periscope.tv&#x2F;w&#x2F;VvV_yzk2fDY0OTI3wusAmiDk5lk8euhHx...</a>. I think it&#x27;s pretty interesting, like a live AMA.<p>EDIT: It&#x27;s over now. It&#x27;s certainly an interesting platform, and I do think it will catch on if celebrities start doing these types of AMA talks. Personally, I would love to watch someone like Sam, PG, or Fred Wilson do one.

This is great. I really like the design and screenshot ability. Even though Meerkat seemed like the first mover in this space, looks like they might be beaten by periscope with a better execution

Disclaimer: I work for upclose.me<p>I think Periscope is great. Other than the nice logo, Meerkat was always very rough around the edges, Periscope actually looks very nice in comparison.<p>It also has less latency.<p>We are obviously looking at the competition very seriously, here at upclose. For now, we have confidence in our ability to compete. Though we haven&#x27;t managed to ride the hype wave like Meerkat and Periscope, we have steady growth.<p>We are also the only platform that also exists on web and Android, and with virtually no latency.<p>I would love to hear your thoughts on upclose

So I&#x27;m guessing Periscope must use HTTP Live Streaming for video? <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StreamingMediaGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;library&#x2F;ios&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;Networ...</a> : <i>Important: iPhone and iPad apps that send large amounts of audio or video data over cellular networks are required to use HTTP Live Streaming.</i>

Didn&#x27;t they just shut down a service that did the same by blocking their twitter api access or am I mixing stuff up ?

Are there any privacy issues using this app? Streams won&#x27;t load for me unless I disable VPN. I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s an issue with my VPN or simply this app (Twitter) blocking &#x2F; throttling VPN in general. Anyone else notice this issue?

Oh wow, went to Appstore to look for it and it&#x27;s Editor&#x27;s Choice. Bam.

The killer feature of Periscope is real time communication and its massive distribution channel, which Meerkat lacks. If broadcasters don&#x27;t see more than a few viewers, they lose interest immediately.

I hope this can help Twitter. It at least feels like one of those things that seems to be much more compatible with the immediacy of the Twitter culture than the Facebook one.

Insight by Wired: <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/03/periscope/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;periscope&#x2F;</a>

Oh, I smell a lawsuit! <a href="http://periscopewebvideo.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;periscopewebvideo.com&#x2F;</a>

Streaming mobile videos ? Great, because the world needed another level of narcissistic obsessive behaviour in the society.

This would be a killer app on Google Glass.

Anyone able to switch to front camera? Meekrat - you can. I prefer that so I can sign to camera while others watch.

Remember even if you mute your microphone, it&#x27;s still possible to extract audio from the video you are streaming: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8</a>

Saw this on Product Hunt too. They&#x27;re getting everywhere huh?

Strange that the &quot;Start Broadcasting&quot; button is &quot;hang up&quot; red.

White Bear

I have this strange sense of aversion to Periscope, even though I know it&#x27;s not logical.<p>It feels to me like Meerkat was a cool thing built by a bunch of my friends that took off, and then the big blood-sucking corporation (Twitter) tried to rip it off and make some money (even though that&#x27;s not accurate).<p>That probably stems from this conversation between Ben (the co-founder of Meerkat), and someone who was building something similar: <a href="http://austenallred.com/assets/ph-ben.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;austenallred.com&#x2F;assets&#x2F;ph-ben.png</a><p>&gt; Pete: &quot;I was working on the exact same app... kind of depressed right now. :(&quot;<p>&gt; Ben: &quot;PETE! What makes you think you&#x27;re not capable of doing something better&#x2F;different? It would be a very sad world if people just gave up on ideas. I can tell you that the live video space is still broken in terms of the distribution mechanism, and that obviously Meerkat is not perfect. There&#x27;s a very good chance that anyone in the world could come up with a better product&#x2F;perspective. Please, go back to code. That&#x27;s how we&#x27;ll all build things better together, even though we&#x27;ll all work separately - we learn from each other.&quot;<p>How can you not fall in love with that product&#x2F;company?