TWITTER IS SHUTTING DOWN ITS PERISCOPE APPLICATION

Twitter Inc., which operates the microblogging social network of the same name, has announced its intention to shut down Periscope application. It is known that the work of the application will be completely terminated on March 31, 2021 Experts believe that the reason for the elimination of the mobile service Periscope, which is used to create and view video broadcasts, was the embedding of its key functions directly into Twitter.

We should recall that the American company bought the Periscope startup six years ago (in 2014) at the beta testing stage shortly before its official launch for $ 100 million. At that time, it was the largest investment by Twitter. One of the founders of the startup is Kayvon Beykpour, who continues to work in one of the leading management positions at Twitter Corporation.

In 2016, Periscope was functionality embedded into the Twitter mobile app.

Since then, the service began to gradually lose popularity, in spite of gaining a significant user base. As the developers of the app note, the cost of its maintenance has only grown in recent years, while the service maintenance mode itself has been unstable.

Registration of users in the Periscope program guaranteed the opportunity to purchase tokens that the members of the social network could send streamers in the form of special "hearts". Individuals, participating in affiliate programs, could subsequently exchange such "gifts" from users for money. Now the ability to purchase "hearts" will be disabled.

The company thanked all the users for their participation. It is noted that the possibility to create new user accounts in the Periscope application has already been discontinued.

The users will be able to download the entire archive of their videos until March 31 and after that, they will be able to carry out further broadcasts via Twitter.

The developers also noted that the decision to close Periscope could have been made earlier, but in 2020, many plans were confused by the pandemic, and a number of priorities in the company's work were changed.

The experts also stated that the publication of the decision to shut down the additional mobile application designed for video broadcasts almost coincided with the information that appeared on Twitter's acquisition of another technology startup, the Squad co-broadcast service. The company announced it in early December.