Periscope, the Twitter-owned live streaming app is on a roll, and the company has come up with some hard figures to back up its claims. For instance, there have been 200 million live broadcasts made via the Periscope app in the first years of its existence, with half of it coming within the past three months alone.
Further, as another yardstick of just how popular Periscope is, it is 110 years’ worth of live videos watched daily via its app on iOS and Android devices. This also marks a 91 percent increase from the 41 years’ worth of video watched last August, which goes to show just how popular the concept of live streaming is at the moment.
Interestingly, while Periscope is keen to cash in on the growing interest among user to live broadcast their videos, it is also the same that is slated to make its going a lot tougher from here onwards. For not only is YouTube, the world’s largest online video site is readying to jump on to the live streaming bandwagon, the social media giant Facebook too has made video broadcast as one of the top priority areas.
Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour though exuded confidence and has stated they are up for it.
“We’re not really fazed by the fact that now suddenly everyone thinks that live streaming is an interesting industry,” said Beykpour. “We were thinking about this before it was super interesting to the big players so the fact that Facebook, the 800-pound gorilla, woke up one day and decided that live was interesting is very flattering for us. They couldn’t have been further from this a year ago.”
Both YouTube and Facebook have a size to their advantage which no doubt ensures they have the early lead here. For instance, YouTube generates hundreds of millions of hours of views every day while Facebook already boasts of over a billion user base. The social networking giant has already launched its live video streaming feature on iOS and the same for its Android app has been introduced just last month.
In contrast, Twitter has seen its growth stagnate over the year and is, in fact, relying on Periscope to bring in some much-needed excitement around it and its services. Towards that, both are also exploring ways of a much closer integration in future to achieve a collective growth though what has been made amply clear is that Periscope will be allowed to retain its independent identity.
Meerkat, the company that was first associated with live video streaming, can already be considered the first casualty here, falling victim to Periscope within the first year of the latter’s coming into being. However, what remains to be seen is how Periscope is able to live and flourish in the company of markedly bigger competition from the likes of say Facebook or YouTube in the coming days.
