On Wednesday, Twitter announced that Periscope’s live videos shared on its news feed will broadcast itself or autoplay right within the tweet. Previously, only the link is visible and users need to tap it to play the video.
“When you tap the video, it goes full-screen and shows Periscope comments and hearts from other viewers,” Twitter said in a media release to announce the integration.
Twitter believes this will give Periscope broadcasters a window to a much bigger audience – specifically Twitter’s 320 million monthly active users worldwide.
While the Periscope app is available on both iOS and Android devices, the new autoplay feature will be available initially on iOS devices. Android users may have to wait, but Twitter gave assurances that the feature will be rolled out on all platforms as soon as they are ready.
Since its launch, Twitter disclosed that Periscope’s active users have already created over 100 million live broadcasts, and there are actually now 40 years’ worth of live video consumed every day on Periscope worldwide.
Integrating Periscope on Twitter seems to be the logical next step for the social media site which of late has been testing the waters for some radical innovations, including the reported plan to expand the 140-character word limit to 10,000 characters, which has spurred a hot debate among users.
The autoplay feature of the Periscope live broadcasts appears to be a more welcome move. A scroll through the live broadcasts for the day shows that they are indeed giving Twitter, already acknowledged as an excellent medium for breaking news, a feel and more heightened sense of the real-time.
Currently, Periscope broadcasters include celebrities and journalists, as well as media companies, especially the tech press, and major brands.
On the first day the autoplay feature went live on Twitter for iOS, ride-sharing app Uber live broadcasts a tour of Dubai aboard an UberChopper. The X-Files News live streams some parts of the Red Carpet premier of the X-Files. Periscope’s own team also broadcast live some of the scenes of the launch from its headquarters in San Francisco.
On New Year’s Day this year, the Periscope team bared their favorite broadcasts from 2015. These include a sunset scene in an unknown island, a penguin parade, a leopard relaxing on a tree branch, tributes at the Place De La Republique the day after the Paris attacks, and interaction sessions with a neuroscience PhD candidate.
The team said it is looking forward to allowing users in 2016 to “discover more of the world through someone else’s eyes.”
source: interaksyon.com
