How Periscope Works

and they'll tell you the story anyway. Really, today's episode is about Periscope and another app called mere Cat, and to a wider extent, the trend towards live streaming in general. So live streaming has been around for a while. It's not that new um and it's been growing in popularity for quite some time, and in some circles it's kind

of old news. There were a lot of early examples like you Stream and justin TV, which I've talked about before on Tech Stuff, and those allowed users the chance to broadcast using a simple setup of a computer, a microphone, a webcam and as long as you had a good Internet connection, you were good to go. Then came Twitch. Twitch is really I think we have to thank Twitch

for truly bringing live streaming to a new level. It started off as kind of a spinoff of justin TV, but it went on to be so incredibly successful that it eclipsed Justin TV, got way bigger, and eventually it replaced it completely. Justin TV went away, Twitch stayed. Twitch is a service designed to allow gamers to stream their gaming activities live to an audience, and gamers can use various setups to broadcast not only the game they're playing, but a video of themselves as they play. It very

popular service out there. At the same time, there were video calling services that became popular, stuff like Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, all of these making it easier to use a mobile device to do a live video call with someone else. And you could do a live broadcast hangout from Google to stream through YouTube if you wanted to. But there wasn't really a streamlined way to use a mobile device to live stream content to a broad audience.

It just wasn't easy. So back in two thousand thirteen, there was a man named Cavan b Core who was traveling to Istanbul and at the time he was the general manager and senior executive of Blackboard Mobile. He had become a member of the senior executive team after his company, Terribly Clever Design, had been acquired, and his interest up to that point had been in developing apps that made it easy for students and faculty to access and use campus data. Also, around that time, Istanbul was not a

terribly safe place to be. There were these escalating political protests. They were getting violent, they were going on in the city, and he wanted to know if these protests were happening in geographic regions close to where he was planning on staying when he traveled Istanbul, and he was having trouble finding that information online and news outlets. He said they moved too slowly, they were too general, they weren't specific enough.

He wanted to be able to look in on very particular places within Istanbul, and he used Twitter to keep an eye on the situation in real time, but found himself wishing that there was some way he could view live video of the scene from there. Now you could watch recorded video after he'd been uploaded and processed, but by then it's it's pretty late. So after all of that, knowing that tons of people have smartphones, tons of people

have the ability to shoot video and record video. Why not have a live streaming app that combines something like a video recording program with a video calling service and make it live streaming. So he would go on to partner with a guy named Joe Bernstein to create such an app. Now, they you that it would need to give people the opportunity to turn a phone into a camera and broadcast that live across the Internet. They also saw the need to make the experience interactive rather than

a simple stream to viewer experience. So they also knew that the experience needed to be interactive and not just a simple stream to viewer experience. So for example, I'm streaming right now on Periscope as I record this, and I can look on my app and see responses. I can see people chatting about what's happening. I can see people giving me hearts if they enjoy it, and as as people are saying it's awesome and how to back

you ps shaggy. So anyway, these two envision and app that would allow people to share anything from an historic event unfolding in real time to just simple everyday activities of their daily lives. They also wanted to include features that would allow viewers to interact in some way by giving feedback or questions, or just generally express love for what's going on. So the two founded Periscope in February

two thousand fourteen. And what's the first thing you do when you've found a new internet startup company, That's right, you beg for money. They sought a round of seed investment from Angel Investors, which included Scott Belski of Adobe, and they raised a few million bucks to start off. Now.

Their pitch included describing periscope as being similar to teleporting to a distant location to see what is going on at that exact moment, and it held a little bit more of a exciting prospect than just watching a prerecorded video. You could actually be their live while it's happening. Now.

In lateen they met with Jessica ver Really, the director of corporate Development and Strategy for Twitter, and for Really was impressed and introduced them to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Twitter co founder Jack Dorsey, who were in turn also impressed. So this goes on. They end up having a great conversation and before long, Twitter makes an offer to buy Periscope to acquire the company, and apparently some other entities were also interested in buying Periscope, so that

helped push up the price. The founder said that it was a fortuitous timing. The amount itself was not made public, but a lot of early reports said it was somewhere in between seventy and a hundred million dollars, so not chump change. Periscope accepted Twitter's offer and the company was acquired in January two thousand fifteen. But Twitter kept it quiet for a little bit longer for reasons I will get into in a moment. Let's just say it was

a gotcha kind of approach. See net reported that according to a regulatory filing, Twitter had spent eighty six point six million dollars total on two acquisitions. That was Periscope as acquisition number one, and a social media startup company called Niche or Niche if you prefer, and people a Niche said the purchase was a about thirty million dollars for their company, so that I put Periscope in around fifty six million dollars or so, so less than what

some reports were saying. And honestly, there are a lot of different accounts for this, and it hasn't been made completely public, so somewhere between fifty six million dollars and a hundred million dollars. That's a small margin of error, right. Anyway, another live streaming app was getting a lot of buzz right around spring of this year called mere Cat. So mere Cat launched in late February two fifteen, and it was built by a group called Life on Air Incorporated.

That was a team headed by Ben Ruben, and mere Cat was leveraging Twitter's social graphs, so you could sign into mere Cat through Twitter and access your followers. That way, followers could get alerts whenever you were going live on Merecat, they could comment on videos, but those videos, those comments were going through Twitter, so actually the comments on Mercat would get published onto Twitter to everybody. Not everyone was

crazy about that. Mere Cat made a particularly big splash at a little event called south By Southwest, And if you're not familiar with south By Southwest, it's a gigantic festival that takes place in Austin. It incorporates music and movies and what they call interactive or internet based uh stuffed lost startup companies end up using south By Southwest is a place to either launch a new product or

to announce new features to existing products. It's really a place if you aren't going to interactive, It's really a place for you to network, literally, to meet other people and convince them that your stuff is the important stuff and that people should really pay attention to you. It's if you can get people on board with your product of south by Southwest that usually spills over to a lot of attention immediately following it. So mere Cat raised

about twelve million dollars in March two thousand fifteen. But that same month, that's when Twitter announced that it had purchased Periscope. It had done that back in January, but kept it quiet until March, and I think a big reason for it was to steal a lot of thunder from meercat. Twitter also did something else that some people thought was kind of dirty pool. Twitter cut the social

graphic access off of mere Cat. So mere Cat had been depending upon Twitter to use that that platform to leverage the value of their service, and now Twitter saying, yeah, you know, we're gonna come out with our own now, so you don't get to do that, And that caused a bit of a stir so. Merecat and Periscope do similar things. They both allow users to live stream from their mobile devices, and both allow followers to watch and

comment on them. But mere cats comments at the time all went through Twitter, so some people would be reluctant to comment on a video as it's happening because they know that the entire world could see the messages. And mere cats broadcasts, at least first, were truly live, so if you missed it, they were gone. You had no

opportunity to see that stuff. You had to be there. Uh. Now, you can use some additional tools to expand Mercat's features so that you can watch videos after they've happened, or you can comment outside of Twitter. You can actually comment within merecat itself, but at the time that was not the case. Periscope when it launched, had a few more bells and whistles. So let's talk about what the app

looks like and what it's features are. So this is gonna be really boring to the people who are watching right now because you already know you're doing it. But for everybody else, here's what periscope is all about. Oh and by the way, tech Crunch really dissed Meercat. When it came out, tech Crunch called it a rough shot app built in ten days ouch uh. In fact, it took about eight weeks according to Ruben to build it, but still and it took years of developed development beyond that.

So let's talk about periscope, what it looks like and the features it has. First. Obviously, the most important thing is you can live stream from your mobile device. You can do this to the general public like I am doing right now. Anyone who has a link to that periscope can see what you are doing. Or you can broadcast to just your followers or a subset of your followers. Viewers can watch live streams on computers, but if they

do that, they can only be passive viewers. There's no interactivity built into the browser version of periscope right now. If you want that interactivity, you have to download the app to your smartphone, and if you watch a live stream through the periscope app, you can interact by chatting or you tap the screen and that sends hearts. Now the hearts show up on screen. Can anyone Can anyone send me some hearts while I talk about this. That

makes me feel better. But the hearts show up on screen and indicate that people are enjoying what they see. Hearts have also come into play in rankings, so accounts that get a lot of hearts get more visibility in the periscope app. Um when you start looking for periscopes to watch, the ones that accumulate a lot of hearts are the ones that go to the top of those lists.

I am so far behind the leaders in this space that unless you just obsessively tapped the screen every time I go on periscope, I won't ever show up on that list, which is okay. And unlike Merecat, the chatting doesn't go to Twitter. All of that chat remains in the periscope app, so you don't have to worry about broadcasting your questions or comments to the whole world. It's just the people who are watching. Although if you do watch the video stream after it goes offline, then you

still have that issue. Oh and I see that I'm stuttering a bit online, so that's fun. Once a stream is done, it stays available for twenty four hours before disappearing, so you can save a stream to your mobile device if you have enough storage on your device to do that, and then you can upload it to YouTube or some other service if you wanted to. Now, if you haven't download the Periscope app, you probably aren't really aware of how it looks or or you know what it looks

like rather or how it works. First, you have to download the app and install it, obviously, that's your first step. And then you have to sign into Periscope. You can do that either by using your Twitter handle and password or through your phone number. So if you don't have Twitter, you don't. You don't have to have it to use Periscope. It's just a lot of functionality will be taken out if you don't have Twitter. So I'm going to concentrate on the Android version because I own an Android phone,

so that's what I'll be talking about. But the iOS one is very similar. It's the same features. I just can't necessarily say the layout is exactly the same. They may be slightly different. But on the Android version, you've got three icons at the top left of the screen when you log in. One lists any live streams from the folks you follow on Periscope. It also lists any streams from the past twenty four hours that came from

those accounts, including your own. Then there's a glob BiCon that let that lists the live streams from around the world that you might be interested in. And then there's a little cluster of people icon that lists the people you follow on Twitter who are also on Periscope, so you can follow them on para Scope as well, assuming you logged into Periscope through Twitter, that is. And under that list of the folks you know is a list of the most loved accounts, and those are the accounts

that have accumulated the most hearts. That's the list I'm never ever going to be on. Now. In the upper right corner of the people page is a link to your accounts, so you can click on that and see how you stack up, like how many people do you follow, how many people follow you? How many hearts have you accumulated?

As of this recording right now, this is my third periscope broadcast I've ever done, and before I started recording, I had around a hundred fifty followers and just over eight hundred hearts, So we'll see how many I have at the end. Probably not that many more, but that's that that tells you I'm at eight hundred. The top periscopers have millions and millions of hearts, so I'm not

in that league. There's also a camera icon on the screen and that initiates the live stream, so if you touch that icon, it'll prompt you to make a few more choices. One thing is you can set the live stream to either public or private. A private livestream can go out to all your followers or just specific people you designate. So I could do a Periscope livestream to a single person if I wanted to. Uh, it won't all show up to the public. They won't be able

to view that stream. At least the video stream won't show up to the public. There was a problem in Periscope's early design that involved Twitter and private video titles. So if the Twitter option was on and you created a private event, the title of the stream would get tweeted out. Only the people you authorized would actually be able to watch the stream, but the title went to everyone.

So if you made a title that was oh, raunchy, or you know, you were making an insold or something and you thought it was funny because only the people who are following you were going to see it, here's the problem. It would go out on your Twitter feed. If you had that at debated, and everyone would see the title. They couldn't see the video, but they would know what you were talking about, so that was an issue.

If your periscope account is linked to Twitter, you can choose to tweet out the live stream to your followers, which I did at the beginning of this stream. And you also need to give your stream a name, so you have to title it. My first pair of scope was I think called Walking Tibbalt. Tibled, by the way, is the name of my puppy dog, and he is a puppy and I think that's where seven hundred of the eight hundred hearts I have came from. So those

hearts really don't belong to me. They belonged to Tibalt, and he earned them, so I'm not upset. Once you're ready, you hit the start broadcasting button and you go. That's it. It's streaming. People who follow you on Periscope will get a notification if they have push notifications turned on that you are live, and if you send a message through Twitter, that will get more folks following you and watching you. Now that also means you'll get notifications when the people

you follow go live as well. Those notifications will pop up on your mobile device. You can open the up and watch and interact at that point. And Periscope can use both the forward facing and rear facing cameras on a mobile device. You can switch between the two either by double tapping on the screen, or you can swipe down, which pulls up some settings and you can change it there.

This lets you show people your point of view or pull it back so you can have a camera face focused on your face so you can address the camera directly. Some other things to keep in mind when you're using periscope. If you have the location data on your of your phone turned on and you activate that on periscope, it will show where you are to people who are viewing the stream. This can be a privacy concern to In fact,

I think originally it was set on by default. Now it's set off, at least on mine by default, so if I want to, I can choose that and let people know where I am. But some people have pointed out this could be a privacy concern. If you were to broadcast where you were, then that could be a safety issue depending upon who you are and who's watching, especially if you're broadcasting from your home and you don't generally make that information publicly available, it could be a

big issue. Some other things to keep in mind when using periscope. If you have the location data on your phone turned on and uh and you don't want people to know exactly where you are, you should switch that off. You should also keep in mind that maybe the neighbors around you don't want the world to know where they live, so just courtesy is something that you have to keep in mind. Also, there is a limit on how many

people can chat on a stream. Not that I'm ever going to hit that, but once that limit is reached, anyone else trying to chat will see that they can't say anything they're blocked from chatting, And that's to make sure that the video isn't completely drowned out by chat messages for these super popular feeds, the ones that get

millions of hearts in a particular stream. Some other features that are useful in periscope include the ability to block someone in chat, which is really helpful if you find someone to be particularly annoying, and you can also block someone in general so that they won't to you when you go live from that point forward. Also important if

someone's trolling you. Unfortunately, there are a lot of female users who have loved the functionality of periscope but have received some terrible harassment, and it's a good thing that that feature exists so that they can at least address that themselves. It's unfortunate that it happens, uh, And I certainly hope that all of my tech stuff fans are the type who would never do that sort of thing. I'm pretty sure you're not. You always are awesome to me.

So how does periscope work? We've got the what it does, but how does it work? Well? Not everything has been revealed, but I imagine that it's relying upon a specific protocol. It's called h t t P Live Streaming, also known as h l S. It's kind of a real time communications protocol and that allows for the transmission of video streams. UH. Generally speaking, it works by using a very common approach. I mean, it's your basic web server approach. You've got

a web server that's designed to distribute video content. So you start broadcasting from your mobile device. The data that you are creating goes out over the network, whether that's a cellular network or a WiFi network, and then travels

to the web server, the periscope web server. The web server then encodes the stream, probably in an h dot to six four format for the video, and then some standard file format for the audio MP three or a C three something like that that gets encapsulated by the impact to transport stream to be carried out to periscope viewers. And the viewers are using either the app or the browser interface to watch the streams, and these are the

clients in the basic classic server client relationship. You probably have heard that phrase a thousand times to talk about the Internet. So the client in this case would either be the browser or the up on your smartphone, and typically the client has the resources necessary to assemble the broadcast data those bits that are coming into the device into a viewable flow of video. So on mobile devices that would be the app on your laptop, that would be a browser or desktop. I don't know why I

just said laptop. I guess they just assume people don't use desktops anymore. Sorry, gamers, I love you. I have a desktop at home too. As the app becomes more popular, scalability becomes an issue. So as the system gets used more heavily, it can dynamically adjust the quality of the

transmitted video. So, in other words, if a lot of people are periscoping from a particular location at a time where a lot of people are are loading up the service, the quality of the video can be downgraded to adjust for that. But obviously that only works for a little while before people start getting upset at the lower quality. So you definitely want to be able to scale up the operation as it gets more popular, uh, and that

could be an issue. Periscope itself is incredibly popular. After ten days of launch, they had hit a million users, so very popular service. Now I'm gonna wrap this up pretty quickly to talk about how periscope has become, uh, this big popular thing and some of the concerns people have had so already mentioned. It got really popular really fast and continues to grow. Second, a lot of that growth has been fueled by people in the public eye using it to connect with fans or with an audience.

And I'm talking like legit famous people, so uh, they're they're using it in a way to show behind the scenes on all sorts of operations, sometimes without clearing it with other people first. So if you're an actor and you're in a movie or a TV series, and you use periscope because you think it's a great way to connect with your fan base. That might be true, but you also might be broadcasting stuff that the studio would

prefer you not to show the entire world. Old, I appreciate it, but the studio might not same thing with writers or really anyone who deals with any you know, stuff that could be sensitive material. For instance here and how stuff works. I'm I'm since I'm periscoping right now. I wanted to make sure that everyone I came into contact with knew I was periscoping, so that they would

have the opportunity to put on their best face. So we don't get any moments of someone having a maybe a moment they don't want broadcast to the entire world. So it's it's actually requiring us to think about being courteous online. And you don't have to be famous to get a following on periscope, or at least you don't have to start off being famous to get a following. You could get a big following and become famous that way. A couple of people have actually already and it's not

even that old of an app. Some people are even using it to create live entertainment events. So they're making a like almost like a live television show, complete with effects and different characters. And it's really incredible to think, like it's like the old days of live radio and live TV. Uh there's something really special about being present when something is happening for real, like when it's happening

at that time. And uh, I really love That's my favorite one of my favorite things about live theater, and now it's one of my favorite things about this live streaming. But there is this big concern about privacy, and it's not just about the location data. It's also about those people around you who may not want their faces or voices broadcast to the general public. So personally, what I've I've taken upon myself is when I'm walking through a neighborhood.

I the second live stream I ever did was my walk to work, So if you cut to watch that, boy, it was riveting. And when I would walk through a public space like a little area of Atlanta called Little

Five Points, super funky neighborhood. When I was walking through that, I had the camera facing forward um as in a well rear facing camera really because it was the view I had, so you could see the streets, but then I would turn down the neighborhood and I would reverse the camera view to be on me to protect the privacy of the neighbors. That's generally what I was doing, just as you know, thoughtfulness for them. I hope that

that becomes a regular thing for most people. So if I'm in a public space, I'll probably switch the camera to reflect my view of the world. Uh. And if I'm in a space it's not as public, I would have it on me instead. There's also a big concern about piracy. So you probably heard about some of these events. Um, the Periscope CEO has said that periscope is a pretty terrible tool for piracy because you're getting standard definition video and a little bitty screen. Uh, it's forced in portrait mode.

You can't do it in landscape. I mean, you could put the phone sideways in landscape, but if you do that, then everyone else has to turn their device sideways. Anyone watching on the Internet has to, like through a brows has to turn their head. Uh, and all the chat

and hearts will come out sideways too, So not ideal. Uh. Also, you you know, you can't really do that according to the terms of service on periscope, the broadcast of any material that's under copyright is against the term of service and you can be banned as a result of doing that. So not a good idea to do that. Uh, it's not a great experience. But there have been some big televised events that have been broadcast over a periscope that

kind of raised this question. Big one being the and I'm sure you guys have figured this one out already, the season five premiere of Game of Thrones, because of course it was Game of Thrones, being an incredibly piratable material. Everyone loves to talk about how it's been pirated so many different times. Um, it happened on the season five premiere.

It also happened during the Floyd Mayweather fight that was a huge deal where something like ninety different periscope streams were going out, but many of them were issued takedown notices, and of the ones that were not, they ended before the fight did, possibly because of hearing about the takedown notices that we're going out to other people. So my question for you guys wrapping this up is what do

you think about live streaming in general? Do you see this as being a new form of entertainment and information, a new way of sharing with friends and family. Or is it just the top of egotistical, self centered obsession, like the kind I have in my heart. Do you feel that way or do you think that this is something that's really awesome and you look forward to using it, either as just a passive viewer or as maybe a

broadcaster yourself. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I would love to hear them, so if you want to share them with me and you're not on the periscope stream right now, the best way to do it is to send me an email hell and that address is text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. I hang out at both of those places. The handle you should use is tech stuff hs W and I will talk

to you again really soon. For more on this and battens another topping a staff works dot com