Twitter's Periscope is a 'platform for truth', claims founder

Periscope, a mobile app that allows anyone to live-broadcast video from anywhere in the world at any time, is the latest darling of the technology industry. Having been acquired by Twitter for around $100m (£67m) in March, it went on to gain a million users in the first 10 days after its launch on Apple iOS, and continues to grow following its release on Android in May.

The app has attracted the attention of broadcasters, politicians and celebrities alike. Sky News presenter Kay Burley, for instance, used it to show viewers behind the scenes of ITV’s Leader Debates in the build up to the general election, and David Cameron used Periscope to broadcast his first address from Number 10.

Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones used Periscope to broadcast a secret show in LA, and more than 40 authors have done live broadcasts on Periscope, showing fans where they write their books and often reading from currently unpublished work.

The app’s meteoric rise has left its founders, Kayvon Beykpour and Joseph Bernstein, spinning. The pair have been friends since elementary school, and have been interested in programming and tinkering with computers since they were children, but it was not until they reached university that they built their first mobile app, iStanford, under the company name of Terriblyclever Design.

The app essentially “put your university in your pocket,” according to Mr Beykpour, allowing students to access all their online academic resources from their iPhones. “It turned out to be right time, right place. We had a number of schools use it, and we were acquired by a company called Blackboard and basically ran the mobile division of Blackboard for four and a half years,” he said.

The idea for Periscope came when Mr Beykpour and Mr Bernstein were travelling around Europe in 2013, and decided to visit Istanbul. At the time there were demonstrations going on in Taksim Square, and the media was full of pictures of police using tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters.

^{Above: Demonstrations in Taksim Square, Istanbul, in 2013}

“I just had a very practical question of whether it was safe for me to go or not, because you watch TV, look at Twitter and you see tear gas all over the place,” said Mr Beykpour, who remains chief executive of Periscope.

“I remember talking to Joe and saying, it’s silly that there are all these smartphones with high-speed internet connections and thousands of people who walk by the street that my hotel’s on every day. Why isn’t there a way for me to see through their eyes what’s happening right now? We decided, let’s try and build the closest thing to a teleportation device that we can.”

Mr Beykpour and Mr Bernstein spent over a year developing prototypes and tweaking the technology. Early versions of the app used still images rather than live video, and were based around the idea of a marketplace, whereby one user would request an image of a certain location and another would provide it – although they quickly realised this was impractical with a small number of users.

When they started experimenting with live broadcast, they discovered that a lot of the video streaming technology that was readily available on mobile had a very high latency, so the delay between an event being filmed and someone being able to view that video was anywhere between 20 and 60 seconds.

“Our original vision was to have the viewers affect the experience by asking things, so we had to have two-second latency. That meant we had to throw away everything else that was out there and write our own encoding and decoding format. It took a while to perfect.”

Mr Beykpour said the ability for viewers to interact with the broadcaster has been central to the app’s success. Most people feel nervous about broadcasting live, because it is impossible to gauge how viewers are reacting. Periscope allows viewers to send digital hearts fluttering across the screen as they film and write comments, providing support and encouragement for the broadcaster.

^{Above: Periscope let viewers send hearts and supportive comments to broadcasters}

“When we discovered that mechanic we were like, OK, this is the solution to making more people feel comfortable broadcasting,” said Mr Beykpour.

While the uses of Periscope so far have been diverse, the app has attracted its fair share of controversy. Attendees of this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament have been banned from using the app, for example, because organisers claim it is distracting to players and could breach broadcasting rights.

Mr Beykpour said it is up to events venues to draw up rules about how people can use the technology, but insists that Periscope is a poor tool for piracy, as the quality of a Periscope live-stream is likely to be a lot lower than that of a public broadcaster, for example.

“From our perspective, we’re building a tool that people can use however they want. Obviously a broadcaster wouldn't want someone sitting in their stadium broadcasting live, but I don’t think that’s a use case that’s very popular or people want to do,” he said.

“If you’re trying to pirate a football match or a tennis match or Game of Thrones on HBO, there are 80 different better ways of pirating than on Periscope.”

There are also serious privacy issues associated with the ability to to film and broadcast live. Anyone who has read David Eggers’ dystopian novel, The Circle, will be reminded of the SeeChange cameras that can be embedded in walls and are also worn all day long by characters wishing to be “transparent”, allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times.

Mr Beykpour hasn’t read The Circle, but does believe that transparency is a force for good, allowing people to see what is happening in places that they otherwise would not have access to: “Periscope is built as a platform for transparency. Everyone can broadcast but everyone can watch. That is a world that I’m OK living in,” he said.

He also claims that cultural norms and expectations of privacy have changed since people started carrying smartphones with high quality cameras and internet connections around in their pockets.

Today it is quite obvious if someone is holding up a phone to film a live broadcast on Periscope, and if people are unhappy about being filmed they will make that clear. Mr Beykpour did not rule out integrating Periscope into wearable technology like Google Glass in the future, which would make filming less obvious, but said it would have to "feel right".

^{Above: Periscope could one day be integrated into wearable devices like Google Glass}

“I think there is implicit etiquette right now around how to behave with phones and what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. I’m sure that will continue to change, and ultimately that’s something that society and culture needs to get comfortable with,” he said.

Commenting on Periscope’s marriage with Twitter, Mr Beykpour said that although he and Mr Bernstein will retain creative control of the product, Periscope shares a vision with Twitter that naturally brings the two companies closer together.

He said that Twitter’s forthcoming human-curated news service known as Project Lightning, (which he let slip will be called ‘Moments’), will play a major role in extending and reinforcing that vision, allowing people to follow live events and providing a “visual pulse” of what’s happening around the world.

“We want Periscope to be a platform for truth. It’s unfiltered, it’s unedited, it’s unfettered, and you know it’s happening right now,” he said. “That mishmash of perspectives is ultimately representative of the world and we’re just surfacing it in a way that’s as frictionless as possible. That's the tool that the world deserves.”