03.26.2015 07:24 AM
The mechanics of Periscope are really simple: tap a button, and start streaming whatever your camera lens sees.
Periscopes Kayvon Beykpour, CEO & Co-Founder and Joe Bernstein, Co-Founder, photographed at their headquarters in San Francisco, CA, on March 25th, 2015.
On Monday morning, I watched the Today Show. Not on TV, though, and not standing and screaming alongside middle-aged Texans in the vicious cold outside the show's Rockefeller Center digs. My view was from the middle of the set, between two hulking broadcast cameras, as the three anchors wrapped up a segment. I don't remember what they were talking about, only that as soon as they threw to commercial, I was suddenly walking up to Al Roker, the show's anchor and weatherman and all-around hilariously weird dude. Just as he bent over to grab something from underneath the set's table, a voice I couldn't see said, "hey Al, say hi to Periscope."
Roker looked directly at me, and smiled. "Heyyy, Periscope. How ya doing, Periscope?"
In a week of beta-testing Periscope, the live-streaming app that Twitter bought for a reported $100 million early this year and is officially launching today, I've seen a lot of crazy things. I've watched astronaut Chris Hadfield's feet as he lay on the beach in Playa del Carmen. (He has a weird big toe.) I've gotten a tour of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's operating room. I've watched venture capitalist Megan Quinn wander around Croatia and attempt to pronounce the name of its capital, Zagreb. I've seen Tim Ferriss, he of the four-hour workweek and various other crazy self-hacks, show off his screwed-up shoulder, then go through the long regimen he's using to help it heal. I've lounged inside the pit of an orchestra as a french horn tooted away. And I've absorbed hours of mundanity---the walking down the street, the dogs, the out-the-window shots of bridges and buildings---from the odd mix of Twitter employees, journalists, and celebrities (Tyra Banks!) allowed into the beta.
Like any good citizen of an app designed to stream quick and simple moments in our lives, I've also turned my phone’s rear camera into a window to my world. I walked upstream through the throngs of people heading to work in downtown New York City. I asked for commiseration as I walked the two blocks and six flights of stairs that I trekked back and forth, from my apartment to the car, as my girlfriend and I prepared to move out of New York City. I watched a delightfully gruff old man fix a pair of shoes, and a couple of strangers watched with me.
Periscope is consensual voyeurism. That's not a new idea---millions use Twitch to watch other people play videogames, while YouTube, UStream, and a dozen others have tried to make businesses out of live-streaming video---but it feels like the right platform and the right time. We all have smartphones now, with good cameras and fast LTE connections. And we're desperate for more unmediated access to the people we care about.
Any doubts about the demand for something like Periscope can be answered by looking at Meerkat, a live-streaming app that has, in the weeks since it launched, shown its users how cool it can be when people invite you into brief, almost always totally unstaged and unmediated moments in their lives. That's what Periscope promises, too, plus the ability to put the viewer in the director's chair and actually participate in the stream. It's more immediate than Twitter, Instagram, even Snapchat. It's life, right now, through anyone's eyes I choose. It's intoxicating.
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The idea for Periscope began in the summer of 2013, as Kayvon Beykpour was planning a trip to Istanbul. He'd quit his job at the education-tech giant Blackboard, which had acquired his startup more than four years earlier, and decided to travel the world.
Just before Beykpour left, however, protests broke out in Taksim Square---near the hotel he was scheduled to check into---and quickly turned from peaceful to violent. He dove into TV news and Twitter, trying to figure out if it was safe for him to go to Istanbul. But all he got were the craziest images, the most dramatic stories, not the answer to his real question: what's actually going on outside my hotel? Is it safe? There are probably thousands of people with smartphones and high-speed connections in Taksim Square right now, he figured. Why couldn’t he see what they were seeing in real time?
He eventually made it to Istanbul, and came back with an idea. He and co-founder Joe Bernstein began to build the app that would become Periscope. After experimenting with a prototype that involved dropping a pin on a map and hoping someone replied with photos, the pair settled on creating a live-streaming app that would let you broadcast what you were seeing to anyone in the world, in real time.
Cooking lessons, live on PeriscopeCooking lessons, live on Periscope
The mechanics of Periscope are really simple: tap a button, and start streaming whatever your camera lens sees. Anyone who follows you gets a notification to tune in (you can also host a private broadcast for a few selected people), and they can watch in the app or any web browser. Some streamers are silent, others prefer to narrate the action. Some streams are selfies, which makes onlookers feel like they’re in a Baby Bjorn attached to the broadcaster’s chest, watching them talk down into the camera.