Twitter is today taking yet another step towards making its platform more acceptable to everyone. The micro-blogging platform had announced the addition of 360-degree live streaming support via Periscope back in December last year. This feature was then rolled out only to a select group of influencers at the time. But, it is now being extended to everyone on the platform from right this instant.
Announced via an official tweet, Periscope said that anyone broadcasting on the platform (or on Twitter, thanks to its recent native integration) can now convert their live streams into 360-degree immersive experiences. This is being made possible by removing at least one cap — of being an influencer — and adding support for necessary tech.
If you’re broadcasting through Periscope’s iOS application, then you only need to attach the Insta360 Nano 360-degree camera. The iOS app has been natively integrated with support for the said camera, but not the Android one. The latter half of the users, which are probably larger in number, require the Periscope Producer app to broadcast 360-degree videos from their Android devices. They are expected to use either of these two spherical cameras — the Ricoh Theta S or the Orah 4i to stream via Periscope Producer.
In the official blog post, Periscope says 360-degree live video is not about popularizing the technology among its ~320 million daily active users but providing them with an immersive experience. It is of the opinion that the broadcaster is generally expected to fret about the framing and angles of the stream, but 360-degree video frees them of such headaches. The blog post further adds,
As a broadcaster, 360 video allows you to spend less time and energy on framing your shot so you can focus on adding new dimension to your viewers’ experience. In 360 broadcasts, viewers will be able to look anywhere while also having the broadcaster present to anchor the broadcast.
Further, Twitter is finally taking some much-awaited and necessary steps to increase focus on live streaming and attract more users to its rather stagnant social platform. Though Facebook has popularised Live video over the past year and is now the preferred destiknation for streaming but Twitter is steadily trying to play catch. It has just has recently expanded the scope of its Periscope tools beyond just an integration to a full-fledged Producer API — to attract media houses, brands and others to natively broadcast on their micro-blogging platform.
