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Edilma Howard
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In December 2020, Twitter announced plans to shut down its video streaming-focused Periscope app. Periscope was pulled from app stores, and the platform formally shut its doors on March 31, 2021. In its announcement on Medium, the Periscope team explained the decision was caused by several factors:
Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein founded Periscope in 2014. It, along with Vine and Meerkat, represented video streaming applications that operated outside the major social media platforms. Periscope users created a profile similar to that of Twitter. The app accessed the user's smartphone camera to livestream video to followers. Viewers could send "hearts" during the broadcast to show appreciation.
Periscope received a lot of attention upon its launch, gaining 10 million visitors within 4 months according to Wikipedia. Like many other apps, it changed how people viewed and engaged with their media. For example, some critics were upset that people could livestream pay-per-view events, circumventing viewing fees. Other entertainment venues, such as the NFL, became early adopters, streaming unique programs on Periscope.
Beykpour came up with the idea for Periscope in 2013 when he was traveling in Istanbul. While on his trip, protests broke out in Taksim Square. He turned to Twitter to find out what was going on. That's when he realized that while he could read about the protests, he couldn't see them. Smartphones were near-ubiquitous then, so the technology existed for people to record videos, there was just no practical platform to share them on.
Beykpour worked with friend and co-founder Bernstein to produce the live-streaming platform that became known as Periscope. They joked that the platform was a "teleportation service." Periscope allowed people to share what was happening around them at that moment with anyone in the world.
It didn't take long for the startup to attract interest from bigger social media companies. Just 11 months after Periscope was founded, and before it had formally launched, Twitter purchased the platform in an estimated deal worth between $75 million and $100 million.
The discontinuation of Periscope highlights how far video adoption has come. As other social media platforms introduced video capabilities, dedicated livestreaming apps became redundant, drawing fewer users and engagement over time. Vine, which Twitter bought a few years before Periscope, was eliminated in 2019. Meerkat saw an even more astonishing end, replaced within a year of its launch by another app. Its replacement, Houseparty, was not as widely adopted.
Despite lasting longer in the market, Twitter incorporated many of Periscope's features into the Twitter app, drawing users away. The Periscope team noted that the technical debt to support its structure rose, increasing its operational costs. The team had looked to discontinue the app earlier in 2020 but postponed the final decision due to disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the Twitter team announced plans to close the platform, they explained that it had been in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state for some time. By the time the announcement was made, most users had migrated away from the platform.
The same month Twitter announced the end of Periscope, it launched an integration with Snapchat which allowed Twitter users on the mobile app on iPhone to share tweets in Snapchat. The company promised integration with Android devices at the time, but as of this writing, it is still unavailable. Twitter also introduced a similar integration with Instagram in June 2021, once again for iOS app users only, which allows tweets to be shared in Instagram Stories.
Consolidation among platforms to strengthen operations is an understandable move. Social media isn't the only technology niche to go through regular consolidations. Marketers have seen a consolidation of social media measurement solutions over the years too. One recent high-profile example was the discontinuation of Klout, as covered in a 2018 post.
When a Twitter user does this, they'll have the option of putting a description that will appear as a tweet describing the stream. Livestream users can also invite guests before going live. Doing so allows a small audience for a broadcast to form, which can help to establish an ongoing livestreaming schedule.
Instagram and YouTube have also adopted many streaming features that the dedicated livestream platforms carried, making them Twitter's main competitors in the livestreaming space. Rather than developing a new tool for live video, Twitter took the route of improving what it offered on its own platform.
Pierre DeBois is the founder and CEO of Zimana, an analytics services firm that helps organizations achieve improvements in marketing, website development, and business operations. Zimana has provided analysis services using Google Analytics, R Programming, Python, JavaScript and other technologies where data and metrics abide. Connect with Pierre DeBois:
Netflix has brought many innovations to woo Indian users such as mobile-only plan which was initially priced at INR 199 per month in 2019. Further, in December 2021, Netflix revised the prices to INR 149 along with bringing down other subscription prices as well.
In another instance last month, during the India vs Australia Test Series, streaming service Disney+ Hotstar also suffered an outage. As the second test match between India vs Australia was being played on February 17, many cricket fans expressed disappointments on social media.
Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, was the victim of a massive attack that began at 7:10 a.m. ET Friday morning. The issue kept some users on the East Coast from accessing Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, PayPal and other sites.
Troubling to security experts was that the attackers relied on Mirai, an easy-to-use program that allows even unskilled hackers to take over online devices and use them to launch DDoS attacks. The software uses malware from phishing emails to first infect a computer or home network, then spreads to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance.
The source code for Mirai was released on the so-called dark web, sites that operate as a sort of online underground for hackers, at the beginning of the month. The release led some security experts to suggest it would soon be widely used by hackers. That appears to have happened in this case.
The attack comes at a time of heightened public sensitivity and concern that the nation's institutions and infrastructure could face large-scale hacking attacks. The most recent example has been the release of emails stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee, which U.S. intelligence sources say was the work of Russia. The topic has come up frequently during the fall's hard-fought presidential campaign.
A post on Hacker News first identified the attack and named the sites that were affected. Several sites, including Spotify and GitHub, took to Twitter Friday morning to post status updates once the social network was back online.
Twitter users similarly took to the service to keep lists of which sites were down and comment on the situation. The term DDoS quickly vaulted to among the top of the site's list of "Trending Topics" in the United States.
As part of its business, Dyn provides DNS services for a given swath of the Internet, effectively its address book. DNS stands for Domain Name System, the decentralized network of files that link the domain names human beings use, such as usatoday.com, with their numeric Internet Protocol addresses, such as 184.50.238.11, which is how computers look for websites.
The attack hit the Dyn server that contains that address book, a service Dyn provides to multiple Internet companies. For anyone attempting to link to a site that used the Dyn service, when they entered an address such as twitter.com or tumblr.com it was unable to link them to the proper numerical IP address, so to their computer it appeared the site was unavailable.
On an iPhone, you can check how much data each of your apps use by going to Settings > Cellular. For each the apps on the alphabetical list, you'll see a small number listed below its title that shows how much data it has used. Scroll to the bottom to see when it started counting this data usage, which is likely either when you first activated your iPhone or installed the app in question. At the bottom of the list, you can tap the Reset Statistics button to start a new count, which could be useful if you do this at the beginning of the month or your billing cycle and then set a reminder to check back 30 days later.
Also from this data-usage list, you can toggle off cellular access for any app, but since you probably want full access to all of your apps in between Wi-Fi networks, I have better ideas on how you can reduce your data usage. I used an iPhone to illustrate the following tips, but similar options are available for Android phones.
Checking Facebook every five minutes certainly eats into your data plan, but checking Facebook every five minutes while letting it autoplay videos is worse. Thankfully, you can limit auto-play videos to Wi-Fi only or disable them altogether. Here's how:
This setting won't prevent videos from autoplaying, but it will stop Instagram from preloading video when you are on a cellular connection. Instagram states that with this setting enabled, "videos may take longer to load over a cellular connection." In my experience, however, I did not notice a delay with videos starting to play.
The good news with YouTube and your monthly data limit is YouTube doesn't autoplay videos. The bad news, of course, is it does nothing but play videos, which can quickly run up your data use when you stray from a Wi-Fi signal.
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