Periscope Adds Interactive Map View So Users Can Find Live Video By Country

With streaming app Periscope, anyone can go from watching a live video in their home city to one thousands of miles away. Now, it’ll be a whole lot easier to take a world journey, thanks to an update released Thursday that adds map view and some other new features.

Previously, Periscope users could find content within the app from seeing streams of their followers and featured global broadcasts (not necessarily by people you follow) selected by the Periscope team. The update now expands the global feed to include an interactive map.

The map is interactive in that users can see and select from live feeds as pins on a map. At first opening, the map gives a worldview, and users will see how many streams are occurring in each country. Users can then zoom in to select specific feeds.

“The best part of the app is how it can take you through different cities in an instant,” said Jon Erlichman, technology reporter and a daily Periscope user, in a recent interview. “Some of the most-watched video is in Paris, and then you can be taken through Hong Kong.”

Know that a breaking news event is occurring in New York? The update will allow users to more quickly discover it. Still, Periscope users cannot search by video name. If a broadcaster chooses to publicize the stream via Twitter, a user could search for keywords on that site.

Map view on the app has been highly anticipated by users. A competitor streaming app ANGL already had map-based browsing. When asked about map view at TechCrunch Disrupt in May, CEO Kayvon Beykpour said, “You should stay tuned to your app store release notes.” Competitor Meerkat has yet to announce plans.

Additionally, the update makes replays of video streams instantly available. Previously, users had to wait a few minutes for their streams to upload after a live broadcast ended. These streams will still be available for public view only for 24 hours.

Sharing links to video streams on Periscope sibling service Twitter has also been expanded to viewers of streams, not just the broadcasters. With Twitter sharing turned on, Periscope users can quickly send out a tweet that reads “LIVE on #Periscope: [Video Title] [Video Link]” of the videos they are broadcasting. In Thursday’s update, viewers of Periscope streams will be able to tweet out links to the broadcasts they are watching from within the app. These tweets will be generated as "watching LIVE on #Periscope: [Video Title] [Video Link]."

Twitter-owned Periscope had over 1 million sign-ups in its first 10 days after launching March 26. The company has yet to release data on active users. As of Thursday, the app is localized to support 29 languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Korean, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese, Dutch, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai, Arabic, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Malay, Romanian, Traditional Chinese, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.