Periscope’s Edge

27 March 2015

Periscope’s Edge

There are a few obvious advantages Periscope has over Meerkat[^1] but these are the important ones.

• Replay.

  • One of the great things about both streaming services is that you have to be there live to experience it. However, there may be times you want a video to have a bit of a longer life. Periscope gives you the option.

• Save to Camera Roll.

  • Even if you let the video die after the stream, you can still save the video for your own viewing pleasure if you so desire.

• Comments aren’t public tweets.

  • Although having a place for the comments to live is important for things like Q&A’s (which Periscope is missing), having every comment go out as a tweet is a little obnoxious. (Update: Meerkat now has the option to opt out of posting comments to Twitter)

• Private Broadcast.

  • If these services start to gain traction, private broadcasts will be an awesome way to go live to just family and friends.

Weaknesses

• No Schedule feature.

  • I think this could end up being a useful feature. I’ve seen it used successfully a few times on Meerkat.

• Interface.

  • Periscope is much better looking than Meerkat, but both of these services are absolutely terrible at showing you videos that are live, and helping you discover things you might actually want to watch. These services are definitely relying on notifications and Twitter’s network (Sorry Meerkat).

1. The biggest being that it is owned by Twitter now. The same Twitter that cut Meerkat off from it’s “social graph”. ↩︎