Up Periscope

A while back I wrote about Meerkat a broadcast App for Twitter feeds. Well now there’s a new game in town: Periscope. Online video broadcasting is undergoing a renaissance. Unfortunately for Meerkat’s developers, Twitter has purchased Periscope and quickly cut Meerkat off from its social graph.

Both apps do the same basic thing: stream live video over theInternet and post a link to the stream through your Twitter account. Both apps let you watch live streams as they happen. The biggest difference between the two is video storage. Meerkat saves videos only to your device, not to the cloud, whereas Periscope can do both, offering an option to save locally and automatically saving to the cloud a replay of any video you broadcast for 24 hours. You can save your own broadcasts, but not the broadcasts of others. Happily, you can cancel replay uploads at the end of a stream, and you can delete replays at any time.

Unlike Meerkat, you have a chance to set up your broadcast beforegoing live. Unfortunately, you can’t switch cameras until you’re actually broadcasting, which is incredibly frustrating. But you can decide beforehand whether you wish to share you location with viewers or post a tweet announcing the stream. Also, unlike Meerkat, you can choose to share your stream with only certain viewers by tapping the lock icon on the broadcast screen.

While watching a stream, you can post comments, but unlike Meerkat, which uses Twitter @replies for comments, Periscope’s comments stay confined within the app. You can also tap the screen to send “hearts.” You can see not only the hearts you send, but the hearts that all viewers are sending. It’s sort of disconcerting how many can appear at once, but if you’re broadcasting, it’s as if your audience is cheering you on. Also, the more hearts you receive, the higher you’ll get in the “Most Loved” list of recommended people to follow.

Periscope’s video quality, reliability, and smoothness is superior to Meerkat. Also, there’s less latency, so what you’re actually seeing is closer to live than Meerkat, which is helpful when you’re interacting with your viewers. Periscope doesn’t let you search for videos, nor does it keep a list of recently viewed videos. So if you stop watching a video stream, you may never find it again. Even pulling up a user’s profile doesn’t show current streams or replays.

If anything, both Periscope and Meerkat suffer from boring content. Then again, this seems to be how all social networks start. Remember when Twitter and Instagram were all about what people were having for lunch? It takes users time to figure out good ways to use new services, and food is always a safe, yet attractive topic of conversation. Read more here from the NY Times.