Twitter has launched Periscope, its live video streaming app on iPhone, which the micro-blogging company acquired earlier this month.
Periscope, which competes directly with Meerkat, lets you live stream videos to your twitter followers. Similar to Meerkat, Twitter’s latest acquisition also allows users to live stream anything – from playing games with friends to doing something adventurous.
While Meerkat and Periscope are working on same principles, Perisocpe seems to be a more refined version of what Meerkat is doing. In functionality though, both are similar. In periscope too, you can start a live video session right away, broadcast it from any place to allow any number of people watch that.
Currently, the app is only available for iPhone with the ability of viewing the live feed on web. The app was in private beta at the time of its acquisition. The feature that makes it better than Meerkat is that it also allows users to save the feed so that they can replay it later, which is missing in Meerkat.
The other good feature is that Periscope keeps all chats within the stream. So, your in-stream chats don’t get published to Twitter like in Meerkat, where there is almost no context for their posting.
It also has a “hearts” system through which users can show their appreciation for a video. Whenever the user taps on the screen, heart appears to you as well as to rest of the viewers. Also, users can tap as many times as they like and even double tap to send two hearts simultaneously.
In this new Periscope app, Twitter has also taken care of user’s privacy. Not all users are comfortable to share videos with everyone. For such users, the app can also stream video privately which is viewable to only invited users. It also lets user delete chat, replays and even the complete record of the video.
Meerkat may be the first app to provide live stream to Twitter followers but Periscope has better UI and UX. It even has better features. It is offering important features like Replay and Private which are missing in Meerkat.
Meerkat was first such kind of app and sometimes, being first helps. Facebook tried to take on Snapchat with Slingshot, but failed. While on the other hand, Periscope has better set of features and polished user experience.
Periscope’s launch signals towards yet another aggressive push by social networking websites, which do not want to be seen as just a social network anymore. Facebook just yesterday introduced embedded video formats, making sure that viewers
