Periscope (app)

History

Beykpour and Bernstein came up with the idea for Periscope while traveling abroad in 2013. Beykpour was in Istanbul when protests broke out in Taksim Square. He wanted to see what was happening there, so he turned to Twitter. While he could read about the protests, he could not see them.

They started the company in February 2014, under the name Bounty. They raised $1.5 million from Founder Collective, Scott Belsky, Maveron, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Bessemer, Stanford – StartX and Sam Shank in April 2014.

Periscope was acquired January 2015 by Twitter before the product had been publicly launched. One investor source says the acquisition amount was "sizeable", above $50 million. Another says it fell between $75 and $100 million. A third says the deal was "small-ish".

The acquisition was officially announced in a tweet from Periscope and retweeted by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo on March 13 after the rival video streaming app Meerkat was a breakout hit at South by Southwest 2015 (March 13–17). Meerkat became the talk of SXSW partially due to Twitter cutting Meerkat off from its social graph just as the festival was starting.

Periscope was launched on March 26, 2015. Later, on May 26, 2015, Periscope was released for Android.

On August 12, 2015, Periscope announced that it had surpassed 10 million accounts, four months after it was launched. At the same time, the company noted that the amount of video being watched had reached a level of "40 years per day". On December 9, 2015, Apple named Periscope as the iPhone App of the Year. On January 26, 2016, the company released an update that allows users to stream live from GoPro.

In April 2016, as part of a wider partnership with Twitter to stream selected Thursday Night Football games, the NFL announced that Periscope would feature ancillary behind the scenes content from these games.

In June 2016, Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives staged a sit-in on the House floor to protest the lack of a vote on a gun control bill. The Speaker pro tem, Rep. Ted Poe, declared the House was in recess and subsequently the House video feed to C-SPAN was shut off. However, after a brief interruption, C-SPAN was able to broadcast the sit-in because Rep. Scott Peters streamed the activity and the speakers using his Periscope account.

In December 2016, some of Periscope's features were integrated into the main Twitter app.

Service

Periscope users have the option to tweet out a link to their Live Stream. They can also choose whether or not to make their video public or viewable to only certain users. Scopes can be LBB (Limited by Broadcaster) which disallows comments.

Although the scoper usually simply uses a handheld device such as a smartphone to broadcast, it is also possible to broadcast through Periscope using a professional vision mixing suite such as Wirecast or Teradek using Periscope Pro.

Periscope allows viewers to send "hearts" to the broadcaster by tapping on the mobile screen as a form of appreciation. The maximum number of users that can be followed is 8,000.

Both the scoper and viewers of the scope are able to block viewers. When blocked by the scoper, users are added to a blocked list, and booted from the scope. If enough scopers block a user, they are blocked from the scope. If they receive more than 4 blocks from 4 different scopes then the user gets shadowbanned.

On September 8, 2015, Techcrunch reported and later confirmed that Periscope was building an AppleTV app. On September 10, 2015, Periscope added the ability to broadcast live in landscape view.

Copyright issues

The app can be misappropriated for copyright infringement, an issue that came to the forefront around the time of the app's launch when several users of the service used it to air the fifth-season premiere of HBO's Game of Thrones live; that network made the claim that the service needed better tools and policies to deal with copyrighted content.

These issues were magnified further by a professional boxing event on May 2, 2015, Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao, which was televised via a pay per view that cost approximately US$90, but saw wide unauthorized distribution through streams of various quality on Periscope. Periscope's terms of service specify that rebroadcasting copyrighted content violates the service's TOS, and can result in suspension or banning the offending account.

Other complaints have come from firms acting on behalf of the NFL, the Premier League, the U.S. Open Tennis Championship and Taylor Swift, according to data from Chilling Effects, which tracks online takedown notices and was started by attorney Wendy Seltzer, several law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Ultimate Fighting Championship, which has kept a close eye on people it believes are illegally streaming its pay-per-view mixed martial arts matches, has sent more than 650 takedown notices to Periscope, according to data from Chilling Effects.

Periscope Summits

A New York summit was held September 22–25, 2015. The New York summit had popular scopers AmandaOleanderJon Erlichman, Tasmin Lucia-Khan, Alex Pettitt, Alex Khan, Alix Witvoet, Bree Olson, and Brian Fanzo were keynote speakers. Another event was held in San Francisco called Summit Live in January 2016 and had popular national and international broadcasters like Jon Erlichman, Vinnie Potestivo, Caroline Lesley (Co-Creators of Parachute TV), Grace Smith, Jason Stolken, MrASingh, and many other speakers.

Scope Day

On November 7, 2015, 56 broadcasters in 37 cities on 6 continents showcased destinations in their respective cities/countries over the course of 16 hours. All broadcasts were saved to a custom page at: katch.me/pages/scopeday. The creator of Scope Day is Mike Lin who created the event. Issac Duckett, the CEO of SCL Brands / Slickchix acquired the rights to Scope Day in December 2015 with plans to create Scope Day Live Expos in major cities.

Coopie Awards

The 1st annual Periscope Awards were held on Sat, April 2, 2016 and were presented by Slick Chix Lifestyle and iCom solutions group.