Periscope has been working diligently lately to bring in some new features into the app and the platform. Twitter, who owns Periscope, has been doing their part when it comes to video, and have been keeping up with Facebook’s video features and presence. Periscope launched over a year ago, and Twitter hasn’t forgotten about it. After adding a temporary way to save broadcasts last week, today’s update brings a permanent way to save them, and a few other nifty features.
Perhaps the most interesting feature in this update is that you can now stream from your drone. Of course, it needs to be a DJI drone, like the new DJI Phantom 4. You’ll be able to fly your drone, and everyone, anywhere in the world can see exactly what you see with the camera on that drone. This feature is similar to the one they launched earlier this year with GoPro. Allowing users to stream on Periscope using their GoPro action camera. Periscope’s CEO, Kayvon Beykpour said that many users were connecting their GoPro to their drone to stream from their drone. Of course, that’s not needed with today’s update.
The other big feature in this update is search. The update is getting a search feature which will allow you to search for videos by hashtags or by topic. So if you want to find videos shot with drones, you’ll be able to do that much easier. One caveat here though, is that these videos that you can search for, are no longer live. When a video is being live-streamed, it won’t appear in search, for now. That will be changing soon though. This is a big change to the way that you search within Periscope. Before this update, you could only search for other users, and not for specific videos or even topics. This Periscope update also adds in the save feature that Periscope sort of added last week. The temporary solution that Periscope used, included users needing to put “#save” in the title for others to be able to save them. Now the option to allow users to save videos will appear in settings – although they mention it’s “launching in the next few weeks”, so this may be a staged rollout or server-side fix.
The update is available now on the Google Play Store, as well as Apple’s App Store for those with iOS devices.