Commentary

For Periscope, It's The Best Of Times And The Worst Of Times

by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, March 28, 2016

Periscope is on top of the world. In honor of its one-year anniversary, the live-streaming service is sharing some very impressive metrics.

Since its launch in March of 2015, Twitter’s live-streaming unit has been used for more that 200 million broadcasts. What’s more, Periscope users now watch around 1 million hours -- or close to 110 years -- of live streams every single day. And that stat only includes live streams viewed via Periscope’s iOS and Android apps.

What explains the super numbers? Well, the service certainly received a boost when Twitter decided to start embedding live-video broadcasts directly into tweets at the beginning of the year. That, and people really seem to like live-video streams.

For Twitter, the only problem is that its rivals have no intention of letting Periscope own the live-streaming space.

On the contrary, Google is readying a live-streaming app that will be closely integrated with YouTube, while Facebook can’t seem to scale its live-video feature fast enough.

In fact, Facebook recently tweaked its algorithm so that Facebook Live videos are now more likely to appear in users’ News Feeds.

No wonder. On average, people watch videos on Facebook more than three times longer when they are live, by the company’s calculations.

Facebook only began testing live video-streaming late last year. Then, in January, it expanded the ability to share live video to iPhone users in more than 30 countries.

More recently, all domestic Android users were invited to join the live-streaming party, while Facebook announced plans to bring in Android users around the world.

As such, continued growth will be not easy feat for Periscope.

apps, mobile, social media, streaming, twitter, video

2 comments about "For Periscope, It's The Best Of Times And The Worst Of Times".

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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics, March 29, 2016 at 8:44 a.m.
If the numbers are so "super" why don't we connect them to the actual number of users this streaming service has recruited and get a more understandable prespective? For example, how much time per day does the average user spend streaming Periscope content?
Reply

John Grono from GAP Research, April 12, 2016 at 3:39 a.m.

One million hours a day.

Superficially impressive.

But to add some persepctive, little old Australia with one-third of one-percent of the world's population watches 72 million hours of TV a day.

If Pinterest is "super" what the devil are we? [Answer: pretty typical, and pretty good at detecting ultra hype.]