Broadcasting

When Twitter launched Periscope earlier this year, the live broadcasting app embraced the natural way to hold smartphones: it portrait mode. But video wants to be shot in landscape as it looks best on TVs and computer displays, and Periscope doesn’t want to be trapped in your phone.

Paving the way for expanding to smart TVs and immediately creating a better viewing experience on the web, Periscope is adding support for broadcasting in landscape for the first time in its latest update for Android. The update lets broadcasters shoot in either landscape or portrait mode and viewers can continue to view new landscape streams in portrait orientation.

There’s also a new Android-only enhancement called Mutual Follow:
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Google has updated Google+ today with a couple notable and highly requested new features for Hangouts on Air users. The first big new feature is the ability to rewind live broadcasts, allowing users to navigate back to the beginning of a broadcast regardless of when they started watching. Other improvements include higher quality video for those joining Hangouts on Air from a mobile device, as well new auto-playing broadcasts that don’t require users to refresh the page when aHangout starts.

Google did note that “it may take longer to set up your Hangout On Air. For example: the ‘Start broadcasting’ button may be grayed out for a bit, before it turns red.” That change is to provide users with enough time to get everything in place before starting the Hangout.

Google appears to have been able to implement the changes by now processing the video in real-time rather than after the fact, which also means it’s promising Hangouts will be instantly uploaded and ready to watch on YouTube the second you go off air:

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