Everyone was a beat reporter when Twitter came along. Now the company behind making everyone an eye witness reporter is now putting those same people live broadcaster. Is Twitter’s Periscope the future live broadcasting? No but a minimum it is now the future of 1st hand witness accounts of events. Before the app even launched it was getting crazy amounts of publicity. The app got its first moment to step on the national stage. The explosion that rocked New York City was being broadcasted within seconds on Periscope. You could change first-person views and locations as easy as you can flip a channel. There were streams that were just a block away. There even a few streams that were right in front of the explosion.
It’s like instant CNN, YouTube and Twitter all combined into one easy to use product. Almost every major company and personality has an account. This unprecedented adoption does not work in the other live streaming services favor. This next-level Twitter lets you experience news as it is happening as it is developing. Periscope is great but with this whole new level of access comes great responsibility. In this new world of unfiltered information one has to wonder how long before it is used as judge and executioner in a very public realtime setting.
Periscope has overnight transform the way that news can be created and consumed and in the process literally wiped them from the Silicon Valley map thanks to Twitter’s user graph. Trust me when I say that this is not a fad; Periscope is here to stay. Look for this service to be used at major events in no time soon. As with all new technology all problems are magnified and projected. With Periscope the bystander effect problem that already exists with YouTube will expand greatly. Bystanders might just broadcast the world instead of helping.