If you enjoy watching live-streaming Periscope videos, be prepared to start seeing some pre-roll ads first. Twitter has announced that it will start selling the ad-slots from today.
Twitter has announced today that it is bringing support for live 360-degree video to the broadcasting service Periscope. The move comes as Twitter continues to heavily invest in live video and faces increasingly strong competition from Facebook and others. Twitter and Periscope outlined the new feature in blog posts.
Twitter has updated both iOS and Android apps with a Live button that starts a Periscope broadcast. It’s actually a bit of a cheat, though, as all the button does is open the Periscope app – or prompt you to download it if you don’t already have it installed.
It was perhaps unimaginable just a few years ago, but live streaming has become particularly popular thanks to apps like Meerkat and, most notoriously, Twitter-acquired Periscope. Not to be left out, Facebook joined the race last summer — albeit initially only for public figures via the dedicated Mentions app — and then pushed beyond earlier this year with the open introduction of “Facebook Live” in the US, a feature within the mobile app that allows anyone to live stream to their friends.
The experiment seems to be working well, and with the app update — which begins its rollout today — Facebook is adding a variety of features to enhance the Facebook Live experience; according to the company, adding a dedicated tab for finding live as well as archived video will “give you more ways to discover, share, and interact with live video, and more ways to personalize your live broadcasts”…
Facebook has today announced that it is bringing its Periscope-like live video broadcast feature to Android. The service received its debut on iPhones last month.
Facebook Live enables you to share your experiences and perspectives in real time, with the people who matter to you – whether you’re someone who wants to broadcast to friends and family, or a public figure who wants to connect with fans around the world. Live videos on Facebook are authentic and exciting, and we’re seeing people tuning in and engaging directly with broadcasters in the moment.
The company says that people spend more than three times longer watching a video when it is live …
Periscope has announced a couple of new features for its popular video-streaming app for Android, both of which will make watching and finding videos much more convenient and wide-ranging…
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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Meerkat, the mobile live-streaming app that competes with Twitter-owned Periscope, continues to move fast with new products that make its streams more accessible, today releasing an embeddable player.
Embeddable players allow anyone with some basic understanding of how to add HTML to a website to include widget-like objects on their sites. What this means in regards to Meerkat is that anyone who live streams using the company’s mobile app can now have their streams viewable from their own websites. We could, for example, host a 9to5 live stream on Meerkat and include the stream in this very post so you wouldn’t have to download an app to see it.
One of Meerkat’s partners with this launch is Discovery Channel, the media giant behind behind Shark Week, the annual week-long programming block all about, well, sharks. And since Shark Week starts on July 5th, the partnership includes Discovery Channel streaming clips all throughout the week of shark-based festivities from their @SharkWeek Meerkat account and through an embedded player on their website. The new embedded web player looks like this:
The player can be customized before it’s embedded – comments can be shown or hidden, there are three sizing options for the player, and if you’re not live it will show your next upcoming stream if you’ve scheduled one. Otherwise if you haven’t scheduled an upcoming stream it’ll show the stats from your last stream.
Even though competitor Periscope is owned and has its salaries paid by Twitter, who’s public market value is $22 billion, Meerkat has managed to stay nimble and ahead in the race to build out features that expand the potential audience of its streams. The company back in May released a developer platform and API upon which others could build their own Meerkat experiences – maybe a full-screen, leanback experience like YouTube TV, for example. The company also released its Android app ahead of Periscope.
The company has been fighting an uphill battle against Periscope ever since the Twitter-owned product launched, however, even though it had a month head start. In many countries including the United States, Periscope ranks much higher in overall downloads as well as in the social networking category, in both Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
It’s hard to say whether mobile live streaming is a winner-takes-all space, or both can live alongside each other in harmony. Periscope has the benefit of one today being more closely integrated with Twitter’s social network, the best in the world for following real-time news. But at the same time it only has roughly 300 million monthly actives, much less than Facebook and on-par with Instagram. How much of a competitive advantage that may be is uncertain. Only time will tell.
After months being completely missing from the biggest smartphone platform there is, Twitter is ready to release a version of its Periscope app and service for Android users. Twitter acquired and launched the live video streaming app earlier this year exclusively for iPhone users, saying in early April that an Android version was in development. Hopefully making up for the lost time, Twitter has included a few features in Periscope for Android that you won’t yet find on iOS.
Livestreaming app Meerkat is out of beta on Android and now available to anyone who wants to try it out, the software’s developers announced today. The app was first released to a limited number of users a month ago for testing before going live to the public.
If you weren’t able to get in on the app’s beta, you can download it for free from the Play Store now. Meanwhile, Twitter is still hard at work on the Android-compatible version of its Meerkat competitor, Periscope, which is only available on iOS at the moment.
Google-owned YouTube had a chance to beat Twitter’s Periscope and its biggest competitor, Meerkat, to market by somewhere in the ballpark of 8 years, but decided against the move due to the fact that a large portion of the company’s resources were engaged in fending off a Viacom lawsuit and creating the Content ID copyright detection system.
Meerkat may have had the launch of its live video streaming app rather overshadowed by Twitter’s official app, Periscope, but it has today made it to Android ahead of its competitor.
Meerkat allows you to live stream video from your phone to all of your Twitter followers at once. Press ‘Stream’, and instantly your live video stream shows up in your follower’s Twitter feeds.
When your followers have the app, they will also get pushed notified with your live stream, watch, comment and interact with it using the app.
It’s officially a beta, so don’t expect everything to work perfectly, but TechCrunch says that it appears to work well …
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Popular live streaming app Meerkat has announced today that it is opening up a public beta for its upcoming Android client. Currently, Meerkat is available only on iOS. Meerkat promised Android support when it first launch, as did its primary competitor, Periscope.
A week ago, Twitter released its answer to mobile live video broadcasting, Periscope. Mobile live video broadcasting is definitely the latest trend in social networking, and it was initially introduced by Meerkat. But both Periscope and Meerkat chose to release their apps on iOS first (as is sadly a common theme). Now that the public’s interest is growing, though, the need for an Android version is pressing.
Periscope summed it up in their latest blog post, with a couple of answers to common questions, one of them being “When is Android coming?”. Periscope, as expected, answered “Soon! We’re working on it.” This is great news for the many Android users who find it unfair and illogical that both Meerkat and Periscope hit iOS first, considering Android has a much larger hold of the mobile OS market.
Periscope didn’t give a timeline, but Android users can rest assured that Periscope will be available to them sometime in the near future. You can read more about Periscope on their official website. As of now, there’s no word on Meerkat.
