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Periscope videos are now autoplaying on Twitter

Lulu Chang
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Get ready for some serious action in your Twitter feed. After acquiring Periscope early in 2015, Twitter is finally making big moves with its real-time video streaming tool. Beginning today, Periscope videos will auto-play in Twitter, all without requiring users to install or join Periscope, or even go outside of Twitter. It’s a brand new deep integration that has been a year in the making, and it’s helping Twitter make good on its promise to help you “see what’s happening right now.”

Much like Facebook’s auto-play feature, the new Periscope rollout will let these videos play unprompted within your stream, and if you tap on a video, you’ll see it in full-screen (just as you would in the Periscope app). And while you can’t really interact with the footage (no comments or hearts available), you’ll be prompted to open the Periscope app (or download it) with a link atop the full-screen version for the video’s full functionality.

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“When you think of Twitter and you think of Periscope, a lot of the vision overlaps,” Sara Haider, Periscope’s mobile engineering lead, told Fast Company. “These are both apps that allow you to see what’s going on in the world right now, and we think that there’s a happy marriage between these two apps that is going to be pretty cool.”

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Despite Twitter’s acquisition of the video-streaming app, the two companies have remained relatively independent, and that certainly hasn’t hurt Periscope. Since it launched a mere 10 months ago, it’s already seen over 100 million live feeds. But now that the two are joining forces, both social media platforms stand to benefit. Twitter, with its more than 300 million monthly active users, will certainly contribute more eyeballs to Periscope videos, while the availability of streaming footage will add a new dimension to Jack Dorsey’s 140-character-bound company. And if the goal is to turn Twitter into the go-to destination for news and current events, it seems that making use of citizen journalists and all the tech tools at their disposal is a no-brainer move.

Currently, the integration is available only on Twitter’s iOS app, but will soon launch on both the website and Android version as well. “If we take ourselves seriously, this vision of, “See the world through someone else’s eyes, see what’s going on in the world right now,” we can’t limit the distribution of that just to people who download the [Periscope] app,” said Periscope software engineer Aaron Wasserman. “Ideally, anyone can view these, however is easiest for them.”

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Lulu Chang
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