Twitter-owned Periscope announced three new viewing and discovery features today, as Facebook Live and other competitors vie for dominance in the burgeoning livestreaming field. The new features, including a “Highlights” service and the ability to embed Periscope streams anywhere across the web, will begin to roll out today and become widely available in coming weeks, the company said.
Periscope’s new Highlights feature will generate short trailers for every broadcast. These highlight reels can comprise several different kinds of clips — a reel of your home feed, a reel of any user’s profile, and reels featuring search terms and hashtags. “We look at a variety of signals to determine what parts of a replay should be included in a highlight,” Periscope wrote in a blog post, “and will continue to improve these signals over time.”
At the same time, Periscope unveiled a new embed feature, meaning that publishers and users can insert a Periscope live stream (or replay) into any article or website simply by embedding a Tweet comprising the Periscope link. Periscope notes that publishers, including Le Parisien, Mashable, Mic, and The Washington Post, are already piloting the feature, which is bound to bring more eyeballs to broadcasts. “We often see articles reference specific Periscopes with screenshots or manual recordings,” Periscope CEO and co-founder Kayvon Beykpour said in a statement. “Now, publishers can easily embed the Periscope itself by simply embedding a tweet.”
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Finally, on its Android app — and coming soon to iOS — Periscope’s Watch Tab and its Global Feed will now autoplay streams on silent so that users can glean an accurate sense of what’s being broadcast across the globe in real time.
