On Monday, May 9, the Twitter-owned Periscope video streaming service has announced new features including video archiving, searching and drones-based broadcasting.
According to Digital Trends, Twitter's Periscope broadcasting service has make it to the top more because of its ease of use rather than its depth of functionality. At launch, the live video streaming service lacked a way of opt out of obtrusive alerts and for several months was missing an Android client. However, the competition pushed Twitter-owned video app to enhance its functionality.
A month ago, Facebook has unveiled its dramatically improved design for live video. Facebook's willingness to pay media companies to broadcast there, combined with its huge audience, threatened Periscope's position. As a reaction to this, now Periscope is addressing some of its shortcomings.
In about three weeks, Periscope will roll out an app update. Starting with the update, video broadcasts will no longer disappear by default after 24 hours. They will be permanently available instead inside the tweets where they are shared and on a broadcaster's profile.
Users can still delete broadcasts whenever they want or set broadcasts to disappear by default if they like. Periscope users can begin making their broadcasts permanent until the update arrives. For this, when they begin streaming, they only need adding "#save" to the description.
By making broadcasts permanent by default, Twitter does not only serve its audience but it also gains a way to accumulate lots of videos. The company can later repurpose and eventually profit in a multitude of ways from their video database.
According to The Verge, for the first time, Periscope is also adding a search bar to the app. Broadcasts and broadcasters have began to be organized by category.
The live video streaming service is also announcing its first integration in a consumer drone. Users will be able to control from their phones cameras installed on recent DJI Phantom models that will broadcast through the service.
