PERISCOPE: TWITTER'S PROMISING LIVE VIDEO STREAMING STARTUP THAT FAILED

Twitter’s once-proud acquisition, Periscope, will shut down its services after March 2021.

- Yetnesh Dubey

For the uninitiated, Periscope was once a popular live video streaming app which rose to fame after Twitter acquired it for $86 million in

March 2015, to fight against another popular live streaming app, Meerkat. The rise and fall of Periscope are closely linked with its parent company Twitter, its rival Meerkat and other market competitors like Facebook. Here’s the full story of Periscope, how a once-promising startup came to an end.

THE FALL OF PERISCOPE: THE STARTUP THAT COULD HAVE BEEN

The live streaming feature wasn’t as widely available in as many apps in 2015, as it is today. Upon seeing this market opportunity, a new startup led by Ben Rubin developed an app that allowed users to live stream video content using just their smartphone.

At this point, the ability to live stream a video was limited to big networks and this new app changed everything. The app was called Meerkat and during the SXSW 2015 festival, it blew up to hundreds of thousands of users.