Twitter is using its subsidiary streaming service, Periscope, for a direct assault on your attention. That’s the only conclusion we can reach, anyway, as the social-media giant’s mobile app now supports both live streams and replays of content from Periscope.
And it’s hitting iOS first, with the feature rolling out today.
“We’ve always wanted to make it as easy as possible to watch and broadcast live video. See the world through someone else’s eyes — that’s been our mission since day one,” Periscope said in a blog post announcing the upgrade. “Today, we’re bringing this vision directly into Twitter by making it possible to watch broadcasts without leaving the Twitter app.”
Periscope’s videos will appear right in your timeline, just like any others. But with a single tap, you can watch them full-screen on your iPhone or iPad and see how many people are watching the stream, read their comments, and watch those weird hearts that mean people are tapping their screens in appreciation flow up the side. In order to join the conversation, however, you’ll have to switch over to Periscope’s own app. We have no word yet on when the feature will hit the Android version.
The company announced and demonstrated the feature live on its own site (obviously). The intro included iOS engineer Jonah Grant pulling up the very content the team was streaming, so you get a dizzying, infinite-iPhone sort of effect going.
If you don’t know anyone who uses the service but still want to check out how it works, just pull up the company’s hashtag in your Twitter app and find one you like.
Twitter bought up Periscope last January, almost three months before it actually launched. The companies claim that over 100 million broadcasts have occurred through the app. Between this integration and the recent news that the company’s usual 140-character post limit might expand to a ridiculous 10,000 characters, the company is looking less and less like the original microblogging platform.
But maybe that’s alright, because if one of my friends meets a puma or something, I wanna see that as soon as possible.
