Periscope – an objective test.
Periscope, the product bought by Twitter to destroy Meerkat (another idea which uses the same principle) enables people to live stream videos from their mobile device, with a minimum latency to any audience using Twitter. Of course the concept of streaming live videos is not new : LiveStream existed a long time ago, but there are many factors enabling success of an application. One in particular is to be around at the right time with a market ready for it.
So, as I have a twitter account, I couldn’t resist to try Meerkat which looked to me a bit sad, with not so many users. I simply arrived after the hype. Periscope, apart the fact that there is no app for it on Android yet (I had to take my son’s iPhone 6), was the way to go.
First of all, as a viewer you will of course see the beautiful european, turkish, asian or Californian girls getting hordes of instant fan, asking for a flirt. (These will get between 50 to the lower hundred users). Then, you will have “the testers”, which will start from around 30 users, and quickly finish to 5, as they are boringly walking down a street. If you dig a bit more, you will find a few companies understanding that restarting the feed will always get you around 50 users or so, and by doing so, will try to pitch their product. Journalists showing behind the scenes are very interesting, and you can actually interact with them ! European football (soccer) teams understood quickly that showing their players arriving in the stadium would be a hit and they are right : every Arsenal, Monaco, etc. getting off from the bus gets an instant around 300-500 viewers.
One of the problems we should think are the trolls. I saw quite a few bad comments/questions, but nothing too terrible. And for instance celebrities will just not reply to anything. The few people I saw that gets in an argument would just agree to disagree with their audience.
In term of recording, it works quite well. At time, you have bugs, such as comments disappearing. And yes, people ask to see the inside of your fridge ! I never got a lot of viewers here, as I am certainly not the most entertaining of all people.
The future of this type of product is very bright. One could think of paying for certain accesses behind the scene, Q and A sessions with celebrities, and of course, the adult industry will be very interested by system as well. Problems will arise as well : Just to name a few : suicide, live slaps, and many other kind of idiotic actions that us humans love to do so much ! Hopefully, lawsuits and adequate age check, reporting system and a good community will permit to block this kind of content.
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