One year after buying live-streaming app Periscope, Twitter will finally start putting its streams directly into your timeline.
The live videos were, until now, only viewable in the Periscope app or at periscope.tv. While Periscope had access to Twitter's social graph — a critical edge over Meerkat, its primary competition in 2015 — sharing a stream to the social network meant tweeting a link, not a piece of media.
Starting today, Twitter is fully integrated with Periscope. When viewed on Twitter's iOS app — support is coming for Android and web — Periscope streams now display the same way photos, videos, and GIFs populate on the platform. It essentially brings the Periscope experience — live broadcasts, hearts from viewers, and a running chat — into a tweet. Twitter will host both live and archived Periscopes, and no one will need to log in to Periscope to tune in.
For Twitter, it's a natural fit and an opportunity to capitalize on its strengths as a platform of immediacy. For Periscope, this integration gives it an opportunity to get in front of a much larger audience. To date, Periscope has hosted 100 million broadcasts — putting those in tweets is going to guarantee they're seen by a whole lot more people.