Periscope Celebrates First Anniversary With 200-Million Stream Milestone

Twitter’s Periscope – a prominent live video streaming app for Android and iOS – is celebrating its first anniversary this week with a milestone of 200 million streams in a year.

Out of the 200 million broadcasts hosted within the app, 100 million were created in the past three months alone, the company wrote in a blog post.

In addition, 110 years’ worth of live video is watched per day across Periscope’s Android and iOS apps, which represents a 91 percent increase from last August.

Twitter acquired Periscope in January 2015 and launched it on March 26 the same year against its main competitor at the time, Meerkat.

With a boom in digital technology, the live video market started to get crowded with the introduction ofFacebook Live and YouTube Connect.

With this, it is difficult to see how Periscope performs against its competitors. Periscope says that it pays attention, above all else, to the time spent on watching videos.

Meerkat in the meanwhile has undergone its own transition. Last month, the company announced it will be ditching live video streaming services in favour of a new video social network.

CEO Ben Rubin said of the transformation, “Mobile broadcast video hasn’t quite exploded as quickly as we’d hoped. The distribution advantages of Twitter/Periscope and Facebook Live drew more early users to them away from us and we were not able to grow as quickly alongside as we had planned.”

Rubin said the new service would be like a social network where “everybody is always live”. Rubin also assured users that Meerkat is not going anywhere. The app still works but the creators have shifted their focus elsewhere.

Written with inputs from IANS