Periscope Testing Snapchat-Like Sketching Feature

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Periscope will soon have a feature that is very popular on Snapchat. The Twitter-owned company is testing a new Sketching feature that allows broadcasters to draw doodles on top of any live video stream. This is very similar to Snapchat’s doodling feature, which has gained huge popularity over the past few years.

Periscope copying Snapchat

Live video has grown a lot in popularity, and developers are competing to introduce cool new features that support it. At times, they even copy from one another, and the same is the case here. Presently, Periscope is testing the new feature with a handful of users (broadcasters and not viewers), but soon it will make it available for everyone.

The new feature will offer a huge number of colors to choose from, and it will also have an eyedropper tool allowing users to select a particular color from anything a person is filming. The video feed will have sketches on it for a couple of seconds only.

A Twitter user named Matt Navarra posted a Periscope stream of a beta test in which a live broadcast in progress can be seen with the broadcaster being able to draw line drawings via touch. The sketch remains fora  few seconds, and then the screen goes blank again.

Sketching will be a perfect tool for broadcasters who need to highlight certain areas of the screen where they want viewers to focus their attention. It can prove really beneficial for an eyewitness report in which a broadcaster is describing certain events that took place sometime in the past.

Speaking to Tech Radar, Periscope said, “We’re testing Sketching with a small group of people. This feature makes it fun and easy for broadcasters to draw on the screen while broadcasting. Coming in a few weeks for everyone!”

To help Twitter in fight against Facebook

Twitter is constantly in a battle with Facebook Live for live broadcast supremacy. Periscope has been around longer, despite the fact that it is way behind Facebook, which has a much larger user base than Twitter. The social networking giant has more than a billion active users, while Twitter has just 300,000 in comparison.

Therefore, it is very important for Periscope to do everything it can to distinguish itself from Facebook Live. It is not that Facebook is sitting still at this time. It launched a new Videos tab last week that made it easier for users to find live feeds.

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