Live-streaming service Periscope celebrates its #YearOne of online presence. Launched last March, the Twitter-owned company revealed significant growth in the number of user streams and the length of live video watched per day. Tech Crunch reports that Periscope users have broadcast over 200 million live streams and watched over 110 years of live video on a daily basis via mobile applications for both iOS and Android. Just for comparison, there is an over 60% increase in the amount of live video watched since August 2015. The company also reveals their user base reached 10 million this year.
What else has changed in a year?
Periscope has won the battle over its front-line competitor Meerkat. Ben Rubin, Meerkat CEO, acknowledged the tight competition in live streaming and decided to “change the course” of the company in March 2015, as reported by Re/Code. Although, Meerkat is no longer in the game, Periscope is currently being challenged by Facebook Live Stream – the most recent endeavor of the leading social network. Facebook seems to be taking the importance of live quite seriously, as could be concluded by the intensity with which its video team is prioritizing live streaming features.
Image credit: medium.com
However, CEO Kayvon Beykpour takes pride in being the first to predict this trend and clearly accepts the new challenge. “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,” claims Beykpour.
On the other hand, the company continues to focus part of its most recent activities on virtual reality. Google and Periscope hosted a virtual reality exploration day yesterday dedicated to college students. Apart from the 3D panoramic view on everything students are learning about, visitors could also enjoy the Arctic Cat 360. This is the name of a virtual reality video experience designed by Periscope experts for their client Arctic Cat.