Elon Musk appears to have been serious about bringing Periscope back.
On Wednesday, the Twitter CEO did a quick video streaming session on Twitter, apparently using old tech from Periscope.
Periscope was a video streaming platform that began testing in 2014, creating so much hype that Twitter acquired it in March 2015, before it ever properly launched. The hype died down fairly quickly, though, and Twitter shut the product down in 2021, citing declining usage and rising costs.
In his impromptu Periscope session, Musk comments that the video is “pretty low-res,” to which someone else (presumably a Twitter developer) says that they “haven’t fixed it in like eight years.”
“This is 2015 Periscope code,” Musk says. “It basically works.”
“We’re just testing the live video feature so we can see if it works, and we can modify it accordingly,” he says. “Just improve the resolution.” Musk spends much of the video complaining about the onslaught of hearts showing up on the video, though the hearts aren’t visible in replays.
Musk previously commented on Twitter’s two video apps, Periscope and Vine, saying that some version of both apps is “inevitable”.
