Microblogging site Twitter recently purchased Periscope, which has been working on an app that allows for the displaying of live content.
Some have seen the move to buy the video-streaming company for just under $100m (£66.4m) as a way for the social platform to bolster its own multimedia services. With both cash and stock used to make the transaction, this marks one of Twitter’s biggest deals to date.
Periscope’s app is currently still in beta testing, although a number of Twitter’s top executives are thought to be personally involved in this trial. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), this includes its chairman, Jack Dorsey, and the social firm’s CEO, Dick Costolo. As such, it is believed that the new acquisition could be seen as a major asset for the company.
Users can already post videos to Twitter’s news feeds, as they can to a number of other social platforms, although the option to provide live streaming may give the microblogging site the competitive edge it needs to continue growing and attracting new members. The company is reportedly also still committed to improving its Vine service, a social platform that allows users to post short videos.
According to the WSJ, this form of immediate multimedia also makes sense given Twitter’s nature, as it is already a “real-time broadcast service”.
However, Meerkat, an app that also displays live video onto Twitter from people’s mobiles, has reportedly grown in leaps and bounds in the time since Periscope’s acquisition. It was reported that the social tool had attracted 60,000 users in just its first eight days.
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