Periscope, which is an app that Twitter created to compete with Meerkat and now Facebook Video, has a cool feature added into the latest beta build. It allows you to draw or doodle on your live stream video in real time. It’s a pretty interesting feature, and actually would be useful for pointing something out on the screen when doing a live Periscope session. It may not be the company or platform’s most popular feature, but it could be useful for quite a few users. It’s important to remember here that this is in beta, so it may or may not make it to the official Periscope app anytime soon. We’ve often times seen beta features for services and they never make it out of beta and get axed.
For those that have the beta version of Periscope, they have reported that the drawings do fade out after a few seconds. So as mentioned above, this would be useful for highlighting things on the screen. There are three primary colors available, but you can also choose one from the droplet from within Periscope. It’s a cool tool for Periscope, and something that’s only available to a small group of users right now.
As Twitter notes in their statement below, the feature is here to be fun for broadcasters. And it’s also something that their competition – mainly Meerkat and Facebook Live Video – don’t have.
”We’re testing Sketching with a small group of people. This feature makes it fun and easy for broadcasters to draw on the screen while broadcasting. Coming in a few weeks for everyone!”
Periscope launched in 2015, shortly after Meerkat did. And it essentially killed Meerkat really quickly. The reason it did so was because Periscope is owned by Twitter, so signing up, creating an account and finding people to follow was very easy to do. In fact, getting followers was very easy as well, especially if you have a large following on Twitter already. Periscope allows users to quickly stream live video, even on somewhat low speed internet connections. It’s great for Q&A, showing off new products, and so much more.