Here's How To #Save Your Periscope Videos More Than 24hrs
Your Periscope witticisms, comedy gold, earnest real-talk, and harsh-but-fair relationship advice can now live on forever, with Twitter adding an easy way to save recordings. Previously, videos streamed through Periscope would be available for replay for a 24 hour period after broadcast, but at that point they'd be deleted altogether.
That 24 hour countdown to deletion was in many ways both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it encouraged spontaneity – scripting out, or professionally blocking a clip that would disappear in a day never quite seemed worth it for most – and pushed creators to use the service more frequently, since they couldn't rely on a body of existing footage to entertain new and existing viewers.
However, on the flip side it discouraged those who wanted their streamed experiences to be preserved. Shooting a once-in-a-lifetime experience to share on Periscope, but then having it auto-delete 24 hours later isn't particularly useful.
Now, there's a fix, and it's an official one in beta from the Periscope team itself.
Adding the hashtag "#save" to the title of a Periscope broadcast will automatically cause it to be saved. Any streams without the hashtag will, as normal, be deleted by default; those that have been stored can later be deleted if you so wish.
According to company CEO Kayvon Beykpour, more granular controls are in the pipeline. Announcing the #save feature through Periscope itself, he confirmed that the engineers are looking to make the 24 hour delete period user-customizable: that way, for instance, you might be able to have a video available for a week-long period but then disappear automatically after that.
It's likely to come as welcome news to brands hoping to make greater use of streaming video for promotional purposes. By making the #save tag optionally, the ephemeral charm of Periscope can hopefully be preserved, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, the upcoming changes will mean that short-lived videos can be potentially timed to last for the length of a campaign – a five day video for the duration of a five day sale, for instance – which should make managing them easier.
This official functionality comes on the heels of the closure of Katch, a third-party Periscope-saving service which sprang up to fill the gap in clip preservation. Although popular, Katch shuttered recently when the startup ran out of funding.
According to Katch, the company had no involvement in Periscope's #save feature.
It throws the ball back into Facebook Live's court, which Mark Zuckerberg & Co. had pitched in part for the permanence of its video broadcasts. Distributed through people and businesses' walls, Facebook Live footage can be deleted but is saved by default.
SOURCE Periscope