Thursday 23 April 2015

Up Periscope... for an amazing view of the world!

    

  


I've been playing around with Twitter's new live video streaming App, Periscope, and I have to say I think it is the next big thing.

The ability to see who is watching, and to communicate with them while you are broadcasting is extremely powerful, and I can see lots of potential marketing uses for it in the future.

Right now, there are lots of 'trial' broadcasts with users clearly playing around with the App in order to familiarise themselves with how it works and what it can do. Like all new platforms, this is bound to happen but I think it will settle into an extremely popular and powerful tool.

Periscope is linked to your Twitter account, so the 'noise' now will be coming from your current followers who are using the platform. Therefore, if like me you have kept your followers to those relevant and interesting to you, you should start to see some useful video broadcasts starting to emerge.

On Saturday morning I was intrigued to see author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki broadcasting as he walked around a motor museum in Berlin. I commented via the onscreen texting facility that he was highly unlikely to see a Tesla among the old Bentley's Ferrari's and Astons and he immediately acknowledged and agreed with my comment via the audio on the broadcast. Amazing!

By simply tapping the screen to make little love hearts appear from the bottom of the page, I could tell him I liked the broadcast. The more I tapped, the more he knew I liked the video.

It is an incredibly simple App to use and I can see many marketing uses for it in the future. Posting live from events, testimonials with clients, interviews etc are all highly possible and potentially powerful on Periscope.

How about a product demo video with the ability to ask the demonstrator relevant questions during the broadcast? The possibilities are endless!

No doubt, there will be some issues to iron out with regard to copyright; what if I live broadcast a Sky football match? However, these problems faced platforms like Pinterest when they launched and they managed to resolve them.

Perhaps a bigger worry is the pornographers; what's to stop live sex shows? Remember, it is your choice who you follow, and you can identify all the people who have been viewing the broadcast, so hopefully porn will not thwart its progress.

Other concerns are the ability to broadcast without a WiFi signal, although I did manage to engage a dozen or so people from the first tee at the King's course, Gleneagles on Sunday. Battery life too, it really does noticeably drain your iPhone, so keep your videos short and snappy or you could be left with a dead phone!

Personally, I'm excited about the possibilities with Periscope; I think it can be a very effective way to create very credible video content (each broadcast can be saved to your camera roll). I'm looking forward to playing around with it some more, and perhaps putting it to good use for a few of our clients.

Currently, Periscope is only available on IOS, but I assume it will be launched for all other devices in the very near future.


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