Twitter is allowing anyone to broadcast live without needing to have Periscope installed on their iOS or Android device. On Wednesday, the company announced that its live video capability has become integrated into its apps, meaning that with a couple of clicks, you can quickly share a moment with your followers.
For a while now, Twitter’s app has featured a button to go live. However, when pressed, it would direct you to Periscope, the livestreaming app the company acquired in 2015. But in an effort to seemingly simplify Twitter, now you can not only tweet, retweet, message, and livestream from a single app. As such, viewers can also comment, send hearts, and do all the things they could have done in Periscope right in Twitter.
“We started Periscope because we wanted to give people the superpower to share live video with an audience,” explained Periscope chief executive Kayvon Beykpour. “Bringing this capability directly into the Twitter app is an important step because it brings that superpower to the hundreds of millions of people who use Twitter.
It’s unknown how many people use Periscope specifically, but unless you had the app downloaded, the current “live” button in Twitter was essentially useless. So to prevent possible obstacles of people going live, the broadcast feature was incorporated natively into Twitter’s apps.
For about a year, the company and its CEO Jack Dorsey have made investments in promoting live, whether it’s about being able to watch sporting events right on its site in real-time or enabling others to share their experiences and moments with their friends and family instantly. And as part of its strategy, Twitter has been endeavoring to streamline things and make itself easier for users. It might be safe to say that today’s announcement meets both of these objectives, but is it enough to bring in more users?
Another way of thinking about this is that as Twitter tries to push a narrative of being live and sharing moments, its core app didn’t really reflect that — it was Periscope. So now the livestreaming app is essentially whitelisting its technology into its parent service so now live and Twitter should go together.
Enabling live video natively brings Twitter up to par with the current experience Facebook offers where you can begin livestreaming through a status update.
