Broadcast live video from your phone: Twitter takes on Meerkat with Periscope

A video-streaming app took the trendy SXSW festival by storm this year.

It was called Meerkat, and it lets you stream video taken on your smartphone straight to the web, using Twitter as the conduit to rope in viewers. Essentially, it lets you live-broadcast from your smartphone.

That was only 10 days ago. 

The joke was that Twitter had bought Meerkat rival by Periscope by lunchtime on the first day of the festival. 

In fact, Twitter bought Periscope in January, for around $US100 million – a tidy sum given it was a product still in development.

Today, Twitter released Periscope as an iOS app (download it here. An Android version should be not far off).

I downloaded Periscope to my iPhone 6 Plus and had a quick play. It's very easy to set up and use. After you've started a live video stream on your phone (which includes audio), you can tweet a link to the live footage.

Anyone can then click on that Twitter link and watch the live video an a laptop, phone, tablet or any device with a web browser. Unlike Meerkat, there's no logon required. Anyone who has Twitter, and a smart device with a browser can just click the link, then watch for however long the footage is livestreamed. Logged-in Periscope users get to follow each other, and send live chat messages – useful if, say, you want to ask the person filming the video to move their smartphone around to shoot something else.

ABOVE: Viewing Periscope video on my laptop. The footage is live streaming from my iPhone, a couple of metres away on a window ledge (the eight people watching the live broadcast also got a quick tour of NBR's office, including exciting footage oft the back of our web producer's head).

When you're done, Periscope gives you the option to save the video to your phone's camera roll, at which point you could share it via YouTube or any conventional service for recorded video.

The video quality is not that crisp, and it's quite choppy if you move your phone at any speed (and I used Periscope on good connections – 4G on my mobile and a laptop on the NBR Towers office network fed by Voyager fibre). However, it's quite servicable. There is a delay of five to 10 seconds between the time you shoot the video and when it streams live.

At this point, there is no cap on the number of people who can view video you broadcast over the web via Periscope (though the number who can leave chat messages tops out at 500).

Live webcasting is not new. Ustream and others have been doing it for five years.

But now it's just got a whole lot easier to shoot and share, and Twitter's version seems to work first time, and every time. This will be a fascinating one to watch. Suddenly, everyone can be their own live TV broadcaster ... or at least those willing to blow their monthly data cap within a couple of hours.

ckeall@nbr.co.nz

Follow @ChrisKeall