Up Periscope: Twitter gets live streaming integration
Only iOS for now, but soon you won't be able to avoid the live-stream takeover
Twitter just got a lot more video-friendly, with Periscope live streaming now appearing in your timeline.
Until today anyone sharing a Periscope link would just see a plain old URL in their timeline. Now, you’ll get the live broadcast, which plays automatically (without sound) as you scroll past it. They’ll start appearing in profiles and individual tweets, too.
A little red box lets you know the video is live, and a running viewer count shows how many other people are tuned in. When the broadcast expires, the preview turns back into a plain link.
With no need to download the app, or create an account to start watching, it should help streamers reach a whole lot more people than they could through the Periscope app alone.
Proper integration has been on the cards since Twitter bought Periscope last year, but there’s still a lot of work to do.
Right now it’s only available on iOS, and not to everyone – the app update is rolling out slowly. It’s coming to Android and the web eventually, but Twitter hasn’t said exactly when.
Moments, the place where live video makes the most sense, doesn’t support Periscope yet either. The company is working on letting users save their broadcasts, rather than making them expire after 24 hours – once that’s in place it should get a wider rollout.
You can’t heart or comment on streams like you can in the Periscope app, but you can retweet, like and reply to them just like any other tweet. 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.
StuffTV
