Twitter’s Periscope on the iOS was officially updated on Tuesday where it now auto-plays videos instead of just providing users with a screenshot and link.
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You can expect to see Periscope videos appear in your Timeline beginning on Tuesday. Given users who simply want to watch video no longer need a Periscope account, and those that want to comment can simply sign in with their Twitter accounts, the emphasis for use of the standalone Periscope app and community has all but been removed for anyone not wanting to broadcast themselves. It’s a passive experience: You can’t create a live stream of your own, or add comments or hearts.
The hope, Haider and Wasserman tell me, is that there will be a whole new flow of conversation around the live broadcasts already happening on the Periscope platform. It’s a bit of a one-way street right now, but that could change once Twitter is done rolling out support across the world.
Both Twitter and Periscope show you what’s going on in the world, right now – whether that’s outside your window or across the globe.
The move has seen some declare it the death or failure of Periscope as a community, rather than simply an app that streams video to Twitter. Unless you’re on Android, in which case the update is coming “soon”. “It’s certainly the first time we’ve done anything like this, but it’s also the first time Twitter’s done anything like this, to have such an immersive experience with an app that isn’t Twitter”.
The end result involves Periscope living within Twitter in a form that’s instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever Periscoped, but which also works with existing Twitter features such as retweeting and search.
Jump over to the Periscope blog for more details via the link below.
As of now, the social media platform has not monetized Periscope. “We had to rethink some of the way we did things to make this possible”, he says.
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Advertisers can promote a tweet that includes an embedded Periscope the same way they promote any other tweet. So far the integration with Periscope, a live streaming video content service, can only be seen on iOS devices such as the iPhone and the iPad.
