I've mentioned previously that Twitter is at a bit of a crossroads. Compared to its social media brethren Facebook and LinkedIn it has found it hard to make the move from a network with lots of users to a viable business making significant profits. Twitter may have grown revenues to $1.4 billion in its 2014 financial year, but it is dwarfed by Facebook, and made a net loss. It even lost 20 million users in the last quarter of the year.
Therefore it has been looking around for ways of increasing both engagement and revenues. Given that the 140 character limit on tweets is more than a little stifling, it has made a big bet on video - first with Vines and now with Periscope. With Vines being extremely short (essentially 6 second loops) they at least fitted in with the stripped down nature of Twitter.
However Periscope is something much more long form. Essentially it is an app that lets you live stream pictures from your mobile phone, in real-time, to your followers. It isn't a new idea - apps such as Bambuser and Livestream have allowed this before. Even more recently Meerkat was the hit of the SXSW festival and raised $12m in funding, announced on the day that Periscope launched. As is the way of cool free new stuff, Periscope has quickly become wildly popular (in social media land at least). This is partly due to its ease of use, but probably more to the prevalence of wifi networks and all you can eat 3G/4G data packages that mean live streaming isn't going to run up huge bills.
Unlike Vines, which have not really moved beyond being a niche application, there is obviously a lot of potential in live streaming, provided that Twitter can capitalise on its early mover advantage over the likes of Facebook. I can see five ways it can be easily used.
1. Journalism
We live in a real-time news cycle, driven by the likes of Twitter. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to add video to tweets from a press conference or the scene of a breaking story. It won't replace having a full camera crew on hand, but will fill the gap between recording and going live. And it will be a boon to citizen journalists and members of the public, giving them another way of recording and sharing stories.
2. Adding to the buzz around events
Twitter works really well at collating and sharing what is happening at events such as conferences. By creating a hashtag and encouraging its use, information and opinions can be quickly published and, most importantly, found easily. It is even possible to skip the conference altogether and just follow the key points on Twitter. Expect conference organisers to embrace Periscope and encourage its use to give a fuller insight into events.
3. Sharing sports events
Much of the internet is driven by either porn or sports, and the X-rated opportunities for Periscope are pretty obvious. I presume Twitter will be quick to crack down on them, but the fact that you can live stream from a sporting event has more lasting possibilities. On one hand it will enable people to share football matches as they happen (expect screams of indignation from rights holders), but more importantly it will let niche sports get their coverage to more people, while using a minimum of infrastructure and at low cost.
4. Catching out celebrities/politicians
I'll wager that it'll be about a week before the first politician is caught saying something stupid/offensive while being live streamed. And, unlike Meerkat, Periscope video streams are kept for 24 hours, meaning that the evidence will be there to be shared, retweeted and generally distributed to the world. Celebrities are likely to fall into the same trap - expect people to use live streaming to replace selfies and photo bombing as a way of interacting with/embarrassing their heroes.
5. Live streaming cats
If cat videos are the most popular things on YouTube, it won't be long before someone puts their cat on Periscope, either live streaming everything they do or finding a way of rigging up a camera to them to show everything they are doing.
Time will tell if Periscope actually does provide an extra dimension (and revenue) for Twitter. However, given I've seen people taking photos of all their meals and putting them on Facebook, be prepared for a combination of a lot of mundane content (and complaints from phone users who rack up huge bills) in the early days before it potentially finds its place.