Periscope, the app that popularized live streaming from smartphones, is shutting down today, just over six years after it launched. The service has already been removed from app stores, and most features will no longer be accessible after today.
Live streaming will live on inside of Twitter, which has owned Periscope since March 2015, just weeks before the service launched. Twitter announced the impending shutdown in December, saying usage was declining, and the app had been in an “unsustainable maintenance-mode state” for a while.
The Periscope website will remain online with an archive of public broadcasts. Periscope users will still be able to download their data through Twitter.
Live streaming became an overnight phenomenon in March 2015 with the debut of Periscope and another app called Meerkat. Though Meerkat came out first, Periscope was able to quickly dethrone it with Twitter’s backing and become the leader in live streaming.
The phenomenon seemed to subside just as quickly, however. Facebook heavily pushed live streaming on its own service, and no platform developed a dominant community around the feature. In December 2016, Twitter added the ability to live stream directly from its own app, removing much of the need for Periscope as a standalone service.
This is it. Our final goodbye. Today is the last day the Periscope app will be available.
We leave you with our gratitude for all the creators and viewers who brighten the Periscope community. We hope to see you all live on Twitter.
— Periscope (@PeriscopeCo) March 31, 2021
