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In the wake of Twitter's decision to give up on Vine, there's a question that is hanging over Periscope: Could it be next?
"It’s funny that people keep saying that. Everything we’ve done demonstrates that we’re doubling down on the platform," Periscope CEO and cofounder Kayvon Beykpour said last month during an hourlong meeting in the basement of Twitter's New York City office.
Periscope is still relevant to Twitter for the same reasons Vine wasn't. Twitter says it wants to be the people's news network, that people go to it for a look at what's happening now. Last month, that meant protests at airports across the country.
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Reassurances from Beykpour aside, it doesn't take much to understand why some see trouble for Periscope in the Twitter tea leaves. Twitter introduced a "Go Live" button within the core app in December. Twitter's only other app, Vine, closed in January, and media reports in February claimed that Beykpour's role at Twitter had changed to oversee much more than Periscope.
There's non-Twitter issues as well. Periscope has not shared any user numbers since August 2015 or usage data since March 2016. Top creators, who Mashablespoke with last week at the Summit.Live conference in Los Angeles, said they are seeing hundreds of fewer viewers per broadcast. Many once self-proclaimed Periscope stars have taken to other platforms like Facebook Live as well as Busker, which has significantly less users but offers revenue for broadcasters.
Still, Twitter is betting its future success on live-streaming video. In its annual 10-K report, submitted Monday, Twitter emphasized its work on Periscope and Twitter Moments, inspiring reaction from the Twitter-verse that Periscope, indeed, was not dead.
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Days of our lives
It seems like just yesterday when Periscope and Meerkat were battling for supremacy in the hot, new world of user-generated mobile livestreaming.
That was, in fact, two years ago, and that feud is long gone. Now, bigger beasts are at bay in Facebook and YouTube. Twitter is still big on live, though sometimes it seems like Periscope is taking a backseat to things like Twitter's deal to stream 10 National Football League Thursday night games or BuzzFeed's election night coverage (Mashable will be partnering with Twitter Live for coverage at South by Southwest).
With money and attention headed toward these efforts, Periscope remains on the other end of the spectrum. With so much of Twitter's focus on the high-end, it would stand to reason that Periscope could be on the chopping block for a company looking to cut costs on its quest to profitability.
Periscope isn't disappearing anytime soon, according to Beykpour.
"We want to give people more reason to go live and one pretty damn good reason is you’re already in Twitter."
"It seems like there was some confusion when we launched the ability to go live with Twitter. Some people were like, 'Oh my god, does that mean the app is going away?' Absolutely not. There are a bunch of ways you can post tweets. You have TweetDeck. You have different formats on Twitter-owned and -operated properties or other clients. We want to give people more reason to go live and one pretty damn good reason is you’re already in Twitter," Beykpour said without hesitation.
Our meeting took place the day before people gathered at airports across the country to protest President Donald Trump's travel ban on Muslim immigrants. At New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport, hundreds streamed the action on their cell phones, and thousands watched.
"If you want to record a breaking news event and you hit 'Go Live' on Twitter, and it takes you to the App Store you’re like, 'What?'" Beykpour said, still defending the decision to introduce streaming directly into Twitter. "We want to make it super easy."
So long to old friends
But why keep Periscope as a brand and an app?
"Having a dedicated space for watching and creating live video, having a dedicated space [where] you can go and discover those communities, where you can search the map, those are things that power the ecosystem. The ecosystem wouldn’t exist without those things," Beykpour said.
That idea of keeping an app for the discovery and community it provided wasn't enough to keep Vine around, however. It may just have to do purely with the numbers. More than 90 percent of the views of Vines happened outside the app, according to two former Vine employees.
And, for Vine, the numbers just weren't growing. Vine last reported 200 million monthly unique viewers in early 2015. It peaked at around 360 million, driven primarily by viral Vines like Duck Army and ones taken after the 2015 Paris attacks, according to a former employee.
"Once Periscope was acquired, Vine was no longer the shiny new toy."
Periscope now aligns with where Twitter is headed in a way that Vine used to.
"Once Periscope was acquired, Vine was no longer the shiny new toy. That was even more of a nail in the coffin. Vine was the forgotten child over in the corner. Kayvon was the new, very suave CEO, and that was even more of, 'Oh shit. How does Vine fit into the overall Twitter strategy again?'" another former Vine employee said.
I asked Beykpour, the "very suave CEO" who that morning spoke over cups of coffee, about the fall of Vine and how he envisions keeping Periscope relevant so that the greater company sees value. He saw two hammers coming for Vine — the irrelevance to Twitter's new mission and Twitter's own video product.
Periscope CEO Kayvon BeykpourCredit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images"The situation was a little bit different for Vine. Vine, RIP," he pauses before continuing, "Vine was an incredible community, an incredible product, but it was first of all less core to Twitter’s mission."
"If you want to go live on Twitter, there’s one platform," Beykpour continued.
Could Twitter decide to shut down Periscope? Of course, but not yet.
"Well as long as people are broadcasting using the app and people are watching using the app, there’s inherent value in it, and people are using the app for broadcasting and watching," Beykpour said. He declined to share updated usage numbers. Twitter last reported in March 2016 that more than 200 million broadcasts had been created and more than 110 years of live video had been watched every day on iOS and Android apps.
What's changed at Periscope
People, including myself, have criticized Periscope for not building fast enough, or enough at all. Increased pressure comes from the rise of Facebook with its own live product. I called out the pace back in December, and Beykpour later jumped in to mention his team's other builds.
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The biggest change, debatably, was when the app allowed users to save videos. At launch, all videos created on Periscope disappeared after 24 hours. The reasoning, Beykpour said, was to make it less intimidating to "Go Live."
"Let’s not try to stress people out with a thing that’s going to last forever because we wanted to ease them into going live, trying it" Beykpour said.
There also have been other updates to the technical side of Periscope that are less obvious but probably the most important. In fact, that's where Periscope still has a leg up over Facebook Live, creators told Mashable -- for now.
"That’s the only reason why when we launched Periscope that it was so successful is because we didn’t just take off-the-shelf stuff and launch it. There were a lot of live-streaming apps at the time. But we spent a lot of time making sure the latency was low, that the battery consumption per minute was better than even other apps," Beykpour said.
After our talk last month, Periscope has introduced several new features, most visibly that Periscope videos now show up as trends on Twitter with the tag "LIVE":
Credit: twitter screenshotPeriscope also opened access to Periscope Producer to everyone, timed with Periscope community manager Lili Salzberg's talk at Summit.Live. Any Periscope user now has access to use external sources such as streaming software, hardware encoders and professional cameras for their broadcasts.
From what's on Apple TV to what's next
Beykpour did not share new user numbers with me. Instead, he talked enthusiastically about the people and the type of videos he sees on the app.
"I always do this on Apple TV when I get home. I’m like, ‘What’s going on on Periscope?’ There’s always multiples of people playing guitar, playing whatever their instrument of choice is and getting that motivation from the audience," Beykpour said.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter hasn't been shelling over millions to publishers and celebrities to use its live product. "We didn’t want a platform that was just a celebrity broadcasting network, in the same way that Twitter wasn’t always the way you hear about celebrities. It is a pulse of the world, what the world is thinking," he said.
Twitter hasn't yet had a Chewbacca Mom level celebrity on Periscope, but Beykpour has an easy time naming creators he loves, like the Wild Earth Safari channel.
"He’s not a celebrity, but his content is fucking awesome. I go to bed and watch this," Beykpour said. "Every night I go to bed at 10 p.m. and then every morning at 9 a.m. they’re producing professional produced safaris in real-time."
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Periscope is invested in curation, yet they don't see themselves as a "media organization," Beykpour said. The company did hire Evan Hansen as Periscope's editor-in-chief back in May 2016. Prior, Hansen worked for three years as editor of Medium, a blogging site led by Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, and before was editor-in-chief of Wired.com.
In order to keep those creators active on Periscope, many ask not just for the spotlight but also for cash. Back when Vine tried to keep its creators using the platform, they asked for the same. Beykpour and Salzberg are quite familiar.
"The folks who are broadcasting, if you kept it really simply, they care about reach, and some of them care about making a living, making money," Beykpour said.
"It’s something that is on the forefront of our mind, but it’s something that we want to be thoughtful with," Salzberg said when asked about monetization of Periscope at Summit.Live. "We have to be very deliberate and careful."
For now, the Periscope team is set on building more into the product and expand their editorial coverage. Already, Periscope is translated for six languages. The team also plans to start a new series on the Periscope Medium blog spotlighting creators.
"I’ve never been a public sharer."
As for Beykpour, he stays out of the spotlight.
"I find myself broadcasting privately more now. There are definitely times that I broadcast publicly. I’ve never been a public sharer. I still, I probably tweet more than I did when I wasn’t part of Twitter, but I’m naturally more of a, I guess, private person."
"Our community team broadcasts on a weekly basis. I can go live and this is both good and bad. I can go live and be running on the beach with my dog, which I do all the time, and the entire broadcast will be very familiar characters giving product feature requests."
But Beykpour knows he must serve that community -- or watch the relevance fade.
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