About a year ago, the term “live video streaming” wasn’t as common to consumers and the thought of being able to instantly share with the world what you were doing, at the moment you were doing it and with just a few taps was mostly nonexistent. Then apps like Twitter’s Periscope emerged and added a whole set of new possibilities for people to communicate through live video. Fast forward to today, the Twitter-owned service has just reached its first birthday and to celebrate, the company released Periscope’s numbers for the past 12 months.
In that time-frame, 200 million broadcasts were made, and half of it were created in the past 3 months. To give you an idea of how much this is, every day 110 years (or almost 1 million hours) of content is watched by Periscope users around the world, which is a 91%-increase since last August. The company released a timeline of their achievements, which started on the web and for iOS on March 26, 2015. Periscope then got an Android version about 2 months later, followed by a Browse by Map feature that allowed users to see what was going on on a map view, then Web Profiles, GoPro support, and much more, having garnered awards of App of the Year by Apple and others.
Despite being one of the most successful platforms for live video streaming, Periscope is not alone in the battle and other big players are also making their moves in this new field. Facebook has already released their Live Video feature to all users around the world and Google is reportedly working on YouTube Connect, a similar service for live video. Facebook didn’t release their live videos numbers but giving the reach Zuckerberg’s social network has, they are probably huge. Having its beginnings as a small startup, Periscope has been acquired by Twitter before its release and given its popularity growth it has become one of Twitter’s main pillars for survival. The microblogging platform has been facing slow user growth and to show its importance, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, recently elevated the head of Periscope to the company’s executive team. Despite the strong numbers, there’s still a lot more ground to cover, from fierce competition to how Twitter will manage to properly monetize the service.