Periscope

» see pscp.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

periscope began as a small project by kayvon beykpour and joe bernstein in 2013 under the working name bounty. the idea was a phone app that let you broadcast a live video stream from wherever you were, with viewers showing up in a chat panel attached to the stream. twitter quietly acquired the company in january 2015 for a price reported between fifty and one hundred million dollars. the public launch came on march 26, 2015 for iphone, with android following two months later.

the app caught fire fast. by august 2015 periscope had over 10 million accounts and apple named it iphone app of the year that december. for a window of around two years live mobile streaming was a culturally distinct thing on the internet, and periscope was where most of it happened in english-speaking countries. journalists used it to cover protests and breaking news. ordinary people held the camera up at concerts and weddings and made it feel normal to watch a stranger walk through their day.

i was on twitter in this era but never really used periscope as a broadcaster. by 2015 i was 31, working in software in turkey, and the people pushing live mobile video tended to be either us journalists or younger users. in turkey periscope had a brief vogue around 2016 with politicians and public figures broadcasting from cars and offices, then faded as twitter pulled the streaming layer into the main app and most of that activity moved to instagram live and youtube live instead.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it died ~

twitter started absorbing periscope into the main app in 2016. by late 2017 you could broadcast a live video directly from the twitter compose screen without opening periscope. the standalone app kept running but the reason to keep it open got thinner every year. the engineering team that had built it dispersed. kayvon beykpour stayed at twitter and eventually became head of product before being pushed out in 2022.

on december 15, 2020 twitter announced that periscope would be discontinued. the official reasoning was declining usage and rising maintenance cost on a product that was no longer a strategic priority. the app was removed from the apple and google stores on march 31, 2021. archived broadcasts remained accessible through twitter for a while, then were folded into twitter live, which itself got renamed and rebranded several times after elon musk took over the parent company in 2022.

the cause of death was internal absorption rather than a market loss. periscope did not lose to a competitor in any clean sense. instagram live and facebook live took the lifestyle streaming slice while twitch held the gamer slice from the start. periscope mostly held the news and citizen-broadcast slice, and twitter eventually decided that slice was better served as a feature inside twitter than as its own app. once that decision was made the standalone product had nowhere to go.

~ what remains ~

the proof that mobile live streaming worked at all. before periscope and meerkat showed up at sxsw 2015, the assumption was that live video on the internet meant a webcam pointed at a desk or a tv-style production. periscope made it normal to point a phone at the world for ten minutes and have viewers show up in real time. instagram live and facebook live built directly on the pattern that periscope made legible, with tiktok live and youtube mobile live following the same template a few years later.

the citizen journalism window. between 2015 and 2017 periscope was the easiest way for someone with a phone to put a live feed of breaking news in front of a public audience. the bbc and other broadcasters started embedding periscope streams in their coverage. that role got harder over time as the bigger platforms added live and as moderation policies tightened, but for a couple of years periscope sat in a slot that no app has quite filled the same way since.

the heart-tap. tapping the screen during a stream made colored hearts float up the side. it was a simple reaction signal that influenced almost every short-form video platform that came after. tiktok hearts trace directly back to it. the gesture vocabulary outlived the app.

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