Periscope — The Live-Streaming App Twitter Bought, Then Swallowed

Periscope was the live-streaming app that arrived as a sensation, defined a moment, and then was quietly digested by the company that owned it. Built by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein, it was acquired by Twitter in January 2015 — before it had even launched publicly — for a reported sum somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Twitter unveiled the app on March 13, 2015, and shipped it on iOS on March 26, with timing that was no accident: a rival app called Meerkat had just become the breakout hit of the South by Southwest festival, and Periscope was Twitter’s pre-loaded answer. The app let anyone broadcast live video from their phone to a worldwide audience that could tap hearts and comment in real time, and for a year or two it felt like the future of the platform.

The early numbers were genuinely strong. By August 2015 Periscope reported it had surpassed 10 million accounts, with viewers watching the equivalent of 40 years of live video every day, and in December 2015 Apple named it iPhone App of the Year. For a brief window, Periscope was the place where breaking news, spontaneous events, and ordinary life went live, and it gave Twitter a credible claim to own a format it had never built itself.

Then the absorption began. Live video was Periscope’s whole reason to exist, but it was also exactly the feature Twitter most wanted inside its own app. Beginning in December 2016, Twitter wired Periscope’s broadcasting directly into the main Twitter client, so users could go live without ever opening the standalone app. From that point the standalone Periscope was a redundancy waiting to be retired. On December 15, 2020, in a Medium post titled “Farewell, Periscope,” Twitter announced the app would shut down, describing it as stuck in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state with declining usage and rising upkeep costs. The standalone app was discontinued on March 31, 2021. Past broadcasts shared to Twitter survived as replays; the app itself did not.

Periscope’s was not a death by failure but a death by success — its core function worked so well that its parent took it in-house and let the original husk go dark. What its broadcasters lost was not the ability to go live, which moved into Twitter, but the dedicated home and community that had grown up around a separate app.