TechStuff Classic: How Periscope Works

What is Periscope? What's the technology behind the company? And did Jonathan livestream a podcast?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio,
and how the Tech Are you? It is a Friday.
It's time for a classic episode. This episode is called
how periscope works. That's how you know it's a classic,

(00:26):
because it don't work no more. But back on August
two fifteen, when this episode originally aired, it did work
in a manner of fashion, and so let's dial back
the clock and remember a periscope in this episode. How
periscope works. So live streaming has been around for a while.

(00:47):
It's not that new um and it's been growing in
popularity for quite some time, and in some circles it's
kind of old news. There were a lot of early examples,
like you stream and Justin TV, which I've talked about
before on tech stuff, and those allowed users the chance
to broadcast using a simple setup of a computer, a microphone,
a Webcam and as long as you had a good

(01:07):
Internet connection, you were good to go. Then came twitch.
Twitch is really I think we have to thank twitch
for truly bringing live streaming to a new level. It
started off as kind of a spinoff of Justin TV,
but it went on to be so incredibly successful that
it eclipsed Justin TV, got way bigger and eventually it

(01:31):
replaced it completely. Justin TV went away, twitch stayed. Twitch
is a service designed to allow gamers to stream their
gaming activities live to an audience, and Gamers can use
various setups to broadcast not only the game they're playing
but a video of themselves as they play. It very
popular service out there. At the same time there were
video calling services that became popular, stuff like skype, facetime,

(01:55):
Google hangouts, all of these making it easier to use
a mobile device to do a live video call with
someone else, and you could do a live broadcast hangout
from Google to stream through youtube if you wanted to.
But there wasn't really a streamlined way to use a
mobile device to live stream content to a broad audience.
It just wasn't easy. So back in two thousand thirteen

(02:18):
there was a man named Cavin B core who was
traveling to Istanbul and at the time he was the
general manager and senior executive of Blackboard Mobile. He had
become a member of the senior executive team after his company,
terribly clever design, had been acquired and his interest up
to that point had been in developing apps that made

(02:38):
it easy for students and faculty to access and use
campus data. Also, around that time, Istanbul was not a
terribly safe place to be. There were these escalating political protests.
They were getting violent, they were going on in the
city and he wanted to know if these protests were
happening in geographic regions close to where he was planning

(03:01):
on staying when he traveled Istanbul. And he was having
trouble finding that information online and news outlets. He said
they moved too slowly, they were too general, they weren't
specific enough. He wanted to be able to look in
on very particular places within Istanbul and he used twitter
to keep an eye on the situation in real time,
but found himself wishing that there was some way he

(03:22):
could view live video of the scene from there. Now
you could watch recorded video after he'd been uploaded and processed,
but by then it's it's pretty late. So after all
of that, knowing that tons of people have smartphones, tons
of people have the ability to shoot video and record video,
why not have a live streaming app that combines something

(03:44):
like a video recording program with a video calling service
and make it live streaming. So he would go on
to partner with a guy named Joe Bernstein to create
such an APP. Now they knew that it would need
to give people the opportunity to turn a phone into
a camera and broadcasts that live across the Internet. They
also saw the need to make the experience interactive rather

(04:06):
than a simple stream to viewer experience. So they also
knew that the experience needed to be interactive and not
just a simple stream to viewer experience. So, for example,
I'm streaming right now on periscope as I record this,
and I can look on my app and see responses.
I can see people chatting about what's happening, I can
see people giving me hearts if they enjoy it, and

(04:29):
as as people are saying it's awesome and howdy back
you PS shaggy. So anyway, these two envisioned and APP
that would allow people to share anything from an historic
event unfolding in real time to just simple everyday activities
of their daily lives. They also wanted to include features
that would allow viewers to interact in some way by

(04:52):
giving feedback or questions or just generally expressing love for
what's going on. So the two founded periscope in February
two thousand fourteen. And what's the first thing you do
when you've found a new Internet startup company? That's right,
you beg for money. They sought a round of seed
investment from Angel Investors, which included Scott Belski of adobe,

(05:15):
and they raised a few million bucks to start off. Now,
their pitch included describing periscope as being similar to teleporting
to a distant location to see what is going on
at that exact moment, and it held a little bit
more of a exciting prospect than just watching a prerecorded video.
You could actually be there live while it's happening. Now,

(05:36):
in lateen they met with Jessica Ver really, the director
of corporate development and strategy for twitter, and for really
was impressed and introduced them to twitter CEO Dick Costolo
and Twitter Co founder Jack Dorsey, who were in turn
also impressed. So this goes on. They end up having

(05:57):
a great conversation and before long twitter make an offer
to buy periscope, to acquire the company, and apparently some
other entities were also interested in buying periscope, so that
helped push up the price. The founder said that it
was a fortuitous timing. The amount itself was not made public,
but a lot of early reports said it was somewhere

(06:18):
in between seventy five and a hundred million dollars, so
not chump change. Periscope accepted twitter's offer and the company
was acquired in January two thou fifteen. But twitter kept
it quiet for a little bit longer for reasons I
will get into in a moment. Let's just say it
was a Gotcha kind of approach. See Net reported that,
according to a regulatory filing, twitter had spent eighty six

(06:42):
point six million dollars total on two acquisitions. That was
periscope as acquisition number one, and a social media startup
company called Niche, or niche if you prefer, and people
in Niche said the purchase was about thirty million dollars
for their company. So that had put periscope in around
fifty six million dollars or so, so less than what
some reports were saying, and honestly, there are a lot

(07:06):
of different accounts for this and it hasn't been made
completely public. So somewhere between fifty six million dollars and
a hundred million dollars. That's a small margin of error right. Anyway,
another live streaming APP was getting a lot of buzz
right around spring of this year, called mere cat. So

(07:27):
mere cat launched in late February, two fifteen, and it
was built by a group called life on Air Incorporated.
That was a team headed by Ben Ruben, and mere
cat was leveraging twitter's social graphs. So you could sign
into mere cat through twitter and access your followers. That way,
followers could get alerts whenever you were going live on merecat.

(07:49):
They could comment on videos, but those videos, those comments
were going through twitter, so actually the comments on mercat
would get published onto twitter to everybody. Not everyone was
crazy about that. Merket made a particularly big splash at
a little event called South by southwest, and if you're
not familiar with south by southwest, it's a gigantic festival

(08:11):
that takes place in Austin. It incorporates music and movies
and what they call interactive or Internet based UH, stuffed
lost startup companies end up using south by southwest is
a place to either launch a new product or to
announce new features to existing products. It's really a place
if you aren't going to interactive. It's really a place

(08:32):
for you to network, literally, to meet other people and
convince them that your stuff is the important stuff and
that people should really pay attention to you. It's if
you can get people on board with your product of
south by southwest that usually spills over to a lot
of attention immediately following it. We'll be back soon with
a little bit more about how periscope works after these messages.

(09:05):
So mere cat raised about twelve million dollars in March,
two thousand fifteen. But that same month, that's when twitter
announced that it had purchased periscope and had done that
back in January but kept it quiet until March, and
I think a big reason for it was to steal
a lot of thunder from mere cat. Twitter also did
something else that some people thought was kind of dirty.

(09:25):
Pool twitter cut the social graphic access off of mere cat.
So mere cat had been depending upon twitter to use
that that platform to leverage the value of their service,
and now twitter saying, yeah, you know, we're going to
come out with our own now so you don't get
to do that, and that caused a bit of a stir.

(09:48):
So mere cat and periscope do similar things. They both
allow users to live stream from their mobile devices and
both allow followers to watch and comment on them. But
mere cats comments at the time all went through twitter.
So some people would be reluctant to comment on a
video as it's happening because they know that the entire
world could see the messages. And mere cats broadcasts, at

(10:09):
least at first, were truly live. So if you missed it,
they were gone. You had no opportunity to see that stuff.
You had to be there. Uh. Now you can use
some additional tools to expand mercats features so that you
can watch videos after they've happened, or you can comment
outside of twitter. You can actually comment within mere cat itself,
but at the time that was not the case. Periscope,

(10:31):
when it launched, had a few more bells and whistles.
So let's talk about what the APP looks like and
what it's features are. So this is gonna be really
boring to the people who are watching right now because
you already know you're doing it, but for everybody else,
here's what periscope is all about. Oh and by the way,
tech crunch really dissed mere cat when it came out,
tech crunch called it a rough shot APP built in

(10:54):
ten days. Ouch H in fact it took about eight weeks,
according to Ruben told it, but still, and it took
years of developed development beyond that. So let's talk about periscope,
what it looks like and the features it has. First,
obviously the most important thing is you can live stream
from your mobile device. You can do this to the

(11:14):
general public, like I am doing right now. Anyone who
has a link to that periscope can see what you
are doing, or you can broadcast to just your followers
or a subset of your followers. Viewers can watch live
streams on computers, but if they do that they can
only be passive viewers. There's no interactivity built into the
browser version of periscope right now. If you want that

(11:34):
interactivity you have to download the APP to your smartphone
and if you watch a live stream through the periscope APP,
you can interact by chatting or you tap the screen
and that sends hearts. Now the hearts show up on screen.
Can Anyone? Can anyone send me some hearts while I
talk about this? Makes me feel better. But the hearts
show up on screen and indicate that people are enjoying
what they see. Hearts have also come into play in rankings,

(11:57):
so accounts that get a lot of hearts get more
visible in the periscope APP. Um when you start looking
for periscopes to watch, the ones that accumulate a lot
of hearts are the ones that go to the top
of those lists. I am so far behind the leaders
in this space that unless you just obsessively tap the

(12:18):
screen every time I go on periscope, I won't ever
show up on that list, which is okay. And unlike Merecat,
the chatting doesn't go to twitter. All of that chat
remains in the periscope APP, so you don't have to
worry about broadcasting your questions or comments to the whole world.
It's just the people who are watching, although if you
do watch the video stream after it goes offline, then

(12:41):
you still have that issue. Oh and I see that
I'm stuttering a bit online, so that's fun. Once a
stream is done, it stays available for twenty four hours
before disappearing. So you can save a stream to your
mobile device, if you have enough storage on your device
to do that, and then you can upload it to
it to Youtube or some other service if you wanted to. Now,
if you haven't download the periscope APP, you probably aren't

(13:03):
really aware of how it looks or or you know
what it looks like rather or how it works. First
you have to download the APP and install it. Obviously
that's your first step, and then you have to sign
into periscope. You can do that either by using your
twitter handle and password or through your phone number. So
if you don't have twitter, you don't. You don't have
to have it to use periscope. It's just a lot

(13:24):
of functionality will be taken out if you don't have twitter.
So I'm going to concentrate on the android version because
I own an android phone, so that's what I'll be
talking about. But the IOS one is very similar to
the same features. I just can't necessarily say the layout
is exactly the same. They may be slightly different. But
on the android version you've got three icons at the

(13:46):
top left of the screen when you log in. One
lists any live streams from the folks you follow on periscope.
It also lists any streams from the past twenty four
hours that came from those accounts, including your own. Then
there's a globe icon that let that the live streams
from around the world that you might be interested in,
and then there's a little cluster of people icon. That
list the people you follow on twitter who are also

(14:08):
on periscope, so you can follow them on periscope as well,
assuming you logged into periscope through twitter, that is. And
under that list of the folks you know is a
list of the most loved accounts, and those are the
accounts that have accumulated the most hearts. That's the list
I'm never ever going to be on. Now in the
upper right corner of the people page is a link

(14:29):
to your accounts, so you can click on that and
see how you stack up, like how many people do
you follow? How many people follow you? How many hearts
have you accumulated as of this recording right now? This
is my third periscope broadcast I've ever done and before
I started recording I had around a hundred fifty followers
and just over eight hundred hearts. So we'll see how

(14:50):
many I have at the end. UH, probably not that
many more, but that's that. That tells you I'm at
eight hundred. The top periscopers have millions and millions of hearts,
so I'm not in that league. There's also a camera
icon on the screen and that initiates the live stream.
So if you touch that icon it'll prompt you to

(15:11):
make a few more choices. One thing is you can
set the live stream to either public or private. A
private livestream can go out to all your followers or
just specific people you designate. So I could do a
periscope livestream to a single person if I wanted to. UH,
and it won't all show up to the public. They
won't be able to view that stream, at least the

(15:31):
video stream won't show up to the public. There was
a problem in periscope's early design that involved twitter and
private video titles. So if the twitter option was on
and you created a private event, the title of the
Stream would get tweeted out. Only the people you authorized
would actually be able to watch the stream, but the
title went to everyone. So if you made a title

(15:56):
that was Oh Raunchy, or you know, you were making
an in solder or something and you thought it was
funny because only the people who are following you were
going to see it, here's the problem. It would go
out on your twitter feed if you had that activated,
and everyone would see the title. They couldn't see the video,
but they would know what you were talking about, so
that was an issue. If your periscope account is linked

(16:18):
to twitter, you can choose to tweet out the live
stream to your followers, which I did at the beginning
of this stream, and you also need to give your
stream a name, so you have to title it. My
first pair of SCOPE was, I think, called walking timbalt. Tibled,
by the way, is the name of my puppy dog,
and he is a puppy, and I think that's where
seven hundred of the eight hundred hearts I have came from.

(16:39):
So those hearts really don't belong to me. They belonged
to Tibalt and he earned them, so I'm not upset.
Once you're ready, you hit the start broadcasting button and
you go. That's it. It's streaming. People who follow you
on periscope will get a notification, if they have push
notifications turned on, that you are live, and if you
send a message through twitter, that will get more folks

(16:59):
following you and watching you. Now that also means you'll
get notifications when the people you follow go live as well.
Those notifications will pop up on your mobile device. You
can open the APP and watch and interact at that point,
and periscope can use both the forward facing and rear
facing cameras. On a mobile device, you can switch between
the two either by double tapping on the screen or
you can swipe down, which pulls up some settings and

(17:22):
you can change it there. This lets you show people
your point of view or pull it back so you
can have a camera focused on your face so you
can address the camera directly. Some other things to keep
in mind when you're using periscope. If you have the
location data on your of your phone turned on and
you activate that on periscope, it will show where you

(17:44):
are to people who are viewing the stream. This can
be a privacy concern to in fact, I think originally
it was set on by default. Now it's set off,
at least on mine, by default. So if I want to,
I can choose that and let people know where I am,
but some people have pointed out this could be a
privacy concern. Now, if you were to broadcast where you were,
then that could be a safety issue, depending upon who

(18:06):
you are and who's watching, especially if you're broadcasting from
your home and you don't generally make that information publicly available,
it could be a big issue. Some other things to
keep in mind when using periscope. If you have the
location data on your phone turned on and uh and
you don't want people to know exactly where you are,
you should switch that off. You should also keep in

(18:28):
mind that maybe the neighbors around you don't want the
world to know where they live. So just courtesy is
something that you have to keep in mind. Also, there
is a limit on how many people can chat on
a stream. Not that I'm ever going to hit that,
but once that limit is reached, anyone else trying to chat,
we'll see that they can't say anything. They're blocked from chatting,

(18:49):
and that's to make sure that the video isn't completely
drowned out by chat messages for these super popular feeds,
the ones that get millions of hearts in a particular stream.
So mother features that are useful in periscope include the
ability to block someone in chat, which is really helpful
if you find someone to be particularly annoying, and you
can also block someone in general so that they won't

(19:09):
see you when you go live from that point forward.
Also important if someone's trolling you. Unfortunately, there are a
lot of female users who have loved the functionality of periscope,
but I've received some terrible harassment, and it's a good
thing that that feature exists so that they can at
least address that themselves. It's unfortunate that it happens, uh,

(19:33):
and I certainly hope that all of my tech stuff
fans are the type who would never do that sort
of thing. I'm pretty sure you're not. You always are
awesome to me. We've got a bit more to say
about how periscope works, which still feels weird to say
in the present tense after these messages. So how does

(20:00):
roscope work? We've got the what it does, but how
does it work? Well, not everything has been revealed, but
I imagine that it's relying upon a specific protocol. It's
called H t t p live streaming, also known as
H L S. it's kind of a real time communications
protocol and that allows for the transmission of video streams. UH,

(20:23):
generally speaking, it works by using a very common approach.
I mean it's your basic web server approach. You've got
a Web server that's designed to distribute video content. So
you start broadcasting from your mobile device the data that
you are creating goes out over the network, whether that's
a cellular network or a Wifi Network, and then travels

(20:45):
to the Web Server, the periscope web server. The web
server then encodes the stream, probably in an h dot
to six four format for the video and then some
standard file format for the audio, MP three or a
c three, something like that. That gets encapsulated by the
impact to transport stream to be carried out to periscope viewers,

(21:08):
and the viewers are using either the APP or the
browser interface to watch the streams, and these are the
clients in the basic classic server client relationship. You probably
have heard that phrase a thousand times to talk about
the Internet. So the client in this case would either
be the browser or the APP on your smartphone, and
typically the client has the resources necessary to assemble the

(21:31):
broadcast data, those bits that are coming into the device,
into a viewable flow of video. So on mobile devices
that would be the APP. On your laptop, that would
be a browser or desktop. I don't know why I
just said Laptop. I guess they just assume people don't
use desktops anymore. Sorry, Gamers, I love you. I have
a desktop at home too. As the APP becomes more popular,

(21:53):
scalability becomes an issue. So as the system gets used
more heavily, it can dynamically adjust the quality of the
transmitted video. So, in other words, if a lot of
people are periscoping from a particular location at a time
where a lot of people are are loading up the service,
the quality of the video can be downgraded to adjust
for that. But obviously that only works for a little

(22:15):
while before people start getting upset at the lower quality.
So you definitely want to be able to scale up
the operation as it gets more popular. Uh, and that
could be an issue. Periscope itself is incredibly popular. After
ten days of launch they had hit a million users,
so very popular service. Now I'M gonna wrap this up

(22:38):
pretty quickly to talk about how periscope has become, uh,
this big popular thing and some of the concerns people
have had. So already mentioned, it got really popular really
fast and continues to grow. Second, a lot of that
growth has been fueled by people in the public eye
using it to connect with fans or with an audience,
and I'm talking like legit famous people. So, UH, they're

(23:01):
they're using it in a way to show behind the
scenes on all sorts of operations, sometimes without clearing it
with other people first. So if you're an actor and
you're in a movie or a TV series and you
use periscope because you think it's a great way to
connect with your fan base, that might be true, but
you also might be broadcasting stuff that the studio would

(23:23):
prefer you not to show the entire world. I appreciate it,
but the studio might not same thing with writers or
really anyone who deals with any you know, stuff that
could be sensitive material, for instance here and how stuff works.
I'm I'm since I'm periscoping right now, I wanted to

(23:44):
make sure that everyone I came into contact with knew
I was periscoping so that they would have the opportunity
to put on their best face so that we don't
get any moments of someone having a maybe a moment
they don't want broadcast to the entire world. So it's
it's actual requiring us to think about being courteous online.

(24:04):
And you don't have to be famous to get a
following on periscope, or at least you don't have to
start off being famous to get a following. You could
get a big following and become famous that way. A
couple of people have actually already and it's not even
that old of an APP. Some people are even using
it to create live entertainment events. So they're making up
like almost like a live television show, complete with effects

(24:27):
and different characters, and it's really incredible to think, like
it's like the old days of live radio and live TV. Uh,
there's something really special about being present when something is
happening for real, like when it's happening at that time
and uh, I really love that's my favorite, one of
my favorite things about live theater and now it's one

(24:49):
of my favorite things about this live streaming. But there
is this big concern about privacy, and it's not just
about the location data. It's also about those people around
you who may not want their faces or voices broadcast
to the general public. So, personally, what I've I've taken
upon myself is when I'm walking through a neighborhood. I
the second live stream I ever did was my walk

(25:10):
to work. So if you cut to watch that, boy,
it was riveting. And when I would walk through a
public space, like a little area of Atlanta called little
five points, Super Funky neighborhood, when I was walking through
that I had the camera facing forward, Um, as in
a rear facing camera really, because it was the view
I had so you could see the streets. But then

(25:31):
I would turn down a neighborhood and I would reverse
the camera view to be on me to protect the
privacy of the neighbors. That's generally what I was doing, just,
as you know, thoughtfulness for them. I hope that that
becomes a regular thing for most people. So if I'm
in a public space I'll probably switch the camera to
reflect my view of the world. Uh, and if I'm

(25:52):
in a space it's not as public, I would have
it on me instead. There's also a big concern about piracy.
So you probably heard about some of these events. Um,
the periscope CEO has said that periscope is a pretty
terrible tool for piracy because you're getting standard definition video
and a little bitty screen. Uh. It's forced in portrait mode.

(26:15):
You can't do it in landscape. I mean you could
put the phone sideways in landscape, but if you do
that then everyone else has to turn their device sideways.
Anyone watching on the Internet has to like through a browser,
has to turn their head uh, and all the chat
and hearts will come out sideways too, so not ideal. Uh. Also,

(26:36):
you you know, you can't really do that. According to
the terms of service on periscope. The broadcast of any
material that's under copyright is against the term of service
and you can be banned as a result of doing that.
So not a good idea to do that. Uh. It's
not a great experience, but there have been some big

(26:57):
televised events that have been broadcast over a periscope that
kind of raised this question, big one being the, and
I'm sure you guys have figured this one out already,
the season five premiere of game of thrones, because of
course it was game of thrones, being an incredibly piratable material.
Everyone loves to talk about how it's been pirated so

(27:18):
many different times. Um, it happened on the season five premiere.
It also happened during the Floyd Mayweather fight. That was
a huge deal, where something like ninety different periscope streams
were going out, but many of them were issued takedown
notices and of the ones that were not, they ended
before the fight did, possibly because of hearing about the

(27:39):
takedown notices that were going out to other people. So
that was how periscope works and of course, as I
was mentioning, it, is no more. Twitter shut periscope down
in March of one, sighting declining user numbers like there.
No one was using it, so there was no reason
to support it. Is essentially what it came down to.

(28:01):
So maybe at some point I'll actually do a full
update on this to just talk about what happened in
the years between one when it was shut down. But yeah, uh,
we we salute you, periscope. We hardly knew you. You
only stuck around for a few years. But yeah, that's
a that's this classic episode. If you have suggestions for
topics I should cover on tech stuff, please reach out

(28:23):
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(28:45):
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