Actor John Hodgman is goofing off with a friend. Famed venture capitalist Chris Sacca is taking questions while walking down the beach. And someone I don't know at all -- not even her name -- is reporting on the building collapse in lower Manhattan from a rooftop nearby. All live, in real time.
These were all videos I watched over the last few days on Periscope, Twitter's (TWTR) new live video streaming app. Install the app, start following people you follow on Twitter who have already installed Periscope and videos start popping up as notifications on your phone. As you watch, in real time, you can also comment or ask questions. Tap the screen to send a "like" in the form of floating, colored hearts.
It's often an interesting and intimate video view directly into someone else's life (it's also much like the view from a similar app, Meerkat, that debuted a few weeks earlier). Perhaps somewhat more often, it's a boring, mundane scene of someone walking down the street or eating a burrito.
There's clearly a big, big idea here, one poised to blow up with mainstream folks, just like the original concept of Twitter. Like Twitter, Periscope goes everywhere on a smartphone, operates in real time and lends a sense of immediacy and access to other people in other places. And just like Twitter, the basic concepts of Periscope work equally well when sharing among a small group of friends, following faraway news events live or seeking a more intimate view of your favorite celebrities and brands. Mario Batali, Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Seacrest are already signed up.
A natural progression
It's a fitting evolution, really. When Twitter started in 2006, smartphones were slower and mobile data networks were much slower. Now with a camera-equipped supercomputer in every pocket and ubiquitous 4G networks getting ready to give way to 5G in a few more years, there's sufficient bandwidth to turn many text messages to video. And won't the carriers be pleased that people have found a whole new reason to burn through their data plans faster than ever? Eugene Wei, the head of product at Flipboard, has a hilarious 32-point prediction of sorts for how the entire live streaming scene will play out.
Periscope and Meerkat are hardly the first to offer this kind of real-time broadcasting. Earlier apps like Qik and Ustream never took hold in the technological zeitgiest, though. The YouNow network claims over 100 million monthly viewers but offers more niche content (among the top trending tags this morning: #bored, #random and #sleepingsquad) . As Ben Popper, a reporter for The Verge web site recently noted, "A lot of what happens on YouNow feels like the PG-13 version of Cam Girls, part confessional conversation, part vaudeville performance."