Twitter doesn’t make a huge mess about purchases of former competitors, unlike its competitor Facebook. However like Facebook, these new properties inevitably find their way through the social network’s core functions, ultimately contributing to their demise. That was the case with Vine, whose legacy was almost buried and overshadowed by stories like Instagram. Periscope is now facing the same fate, although it’s a little shocking that it still survived as an independent app this long in an era where live streaming is already the standard.
The independence of Periscope was actually short-lived, as Twitter picked it up quickly in 2015. Live broadcasting, now best known as live streaming, was still a novelty and a growing fad half a decade ago. It’s almost a part of Internet life today, but the players in that business have been whittled down to a few major ones, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, of course.
It was not shocking that Twitter wanted the core feature of Periscope to be part of its own service and that almost spelled the doom of the latter. Using a separate app just for that with Twitter having its own live streaming feature, probably felt more work than required, even if it merged nicely with Twitter. It also meant doing double work at the end of Periscope, maintaining its own code as well as helping Twitter with the feature.
Periscope also shows that with what users it had left, its code was in a horrible state where it was unsustainable to continue to support it. As such, it has agreed to officially discontinue Periscope by March 2021, at least as an independent app. No new app sign-ups will be approved as soon as the next update begins.
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It says that its legacy will live on, but few will actually even know that Periscope was still in service in the first place. Broadcasts that were posted on Twitter will stay on the Internet as replays, but if they do want to retain those memories of the past, users will have to download their Periscope archives before they shut down next year.
