Periscope’s nascent existence has seen it become quite the disruptive force already, with owner Twitter releasing interesting copyright takedown request figures, which are likely to skyrocket in the coming months.
Since its creation less than five months ago, Periscope has been accused of being an easy tool to help people bypass copyright issues, live-streaming events straight from their smartphone onto the internet.
There are already 10m registered accounts on Periscope, with 2m active daily users. Paired up with Twitter, this makes for an increasingly impressive introduction into today’s communications.
And many of those users seem to be angering providers of copyrighted content. Take HBO for example, the TV company that produced the pay-per-view boxing super-fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather back in May.
Huge numbers of people were interested in watching the fight and, when one or two people Periscope’d it live, they got their wish for free.
Organisers were miffed, but Twitter seemed to find it all very entertaining, with CEO Dick Costolo Tweeting this at the time:
And the winner is… @periscopeco
— dick costolo (@dickc) May 3, 2015
Since then requests to take down content that shouldn’t be streamed for free have risen, fast.
Interestingly, the more they rise, the higher the compliance from Periscope, with overall takedown notices of 1,391 seeing 71pc complied with.
In comparison to Twitter (67pc of 14,694 requests) and Vine (68pc of 2,405) this is clearly impressive but you get the feeling the requests will shoot up as registrations increase.
What is something to watch, though, is how these numbers continue for the rest of the year. Vine, for example, is far older than Periscope, yet June’s figures were heavily weighted in the latter’s favour.
Also, considering the nature of Periscope, it must be increasingly difficult to police as you need real-time responses.
So when these figures rise even higher it will be pretty hard to comply with 71pc of the issues.
Earlier this month, Facebook finally started targeting the live-streaming market, but for public figures only.
Probably to test the market out, it launched Live, a new way for public figures like athletes, musicians and politicians to connect with their fans.
Main image via Anthony Quintano on Flickr
