The Twitter owned Periscope and GoPro have announced a partnership that will allow adrenaline junkies to live stream their extreme footage using a GoPro camera in conjunction with an iPhone.
Periscope deal hopes to help two struggling companies
Both Twitter and GoPro stocks have been in a freefall for some time with the latter’s stock falling over 75% in 2015. That said, GoPro is likely in better shape right now and will launch its first drone, Karma, as well as the Hero 5 later this year hoping for a resurgence. Twitter, yesterday, saw chief executive Jack Dorsey announcing the departure of four major executives while also looking to dramatically lift the 140 character limit of users’ posts that made Twitter a sensation for its brevity.
If Twitter had a highlight in 2015, it was the purchase of Periscope that has seen millions streaming and watching live videos from their smartphones and tablets.
The Twitter-owned Periscope announced the partnership today that will integrate the two companies. Twitter is clearly hoping that it will see more users streaming video and will receive more compelling content provided by GoPro camera users. GoPro has been criticized in the past for failing to adequately use social media to get videos shot with its camera into the mainstream. In theory, it could be quite the partnership for both of the fledgling companies if the 316 million monthly Twitter users take to the partnership.
Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it will now allow Periscope streams to be watched in the Twitter news feed without requiring an external link.
Periscope and GoPro requirements for streaming
Firstly you will need either a GoPro Hero 4 Black or Silver edition and an iPhone. Android users are going to have to wait to take advantage of this partnership for now. The iPhone to be used to stream the live video will need to have both the Periscope and GoPro apps installed on the device. Android users will, however, immediately be able to watch the extreme wide-angle shots provided by the aforementioned GoPro editions.
The obvious concern for those interested in using this hardware pairing to stream videos is battery life. The iPhone is not the greatest when it comes to battery life but considerably less of a hog than the GoPro cameras needed. And when a GoPro Hero 4 has Wi-Fi enabled, this battery life gets dramatically shorter.
Regardless, it will be interesting to see who takes advantage of the partnership between the two.
