Periscope has launched a range of new features aimed at helping users discover new broadcasts on its apps, and across the web.
Foremost among the new updates is a new replay “Highlights” option, available on the home feed and elsewhere. Now, when you log in to the app, you’ll be able to watch short trailers for each broadcast that you missed in real-time. The previews are automatically generated for all the hundreds of millions of videos uploaded to Periscope every day.
Aside from allowing you to easily scroll through Highlights on your home feed, the feature will also be applied to broadcasts on profiles, map locations, and for search entries, allowing you to get a “convenient overview of any topic,” according to the app.
In order to watch previews from your home feed, all you have to do is tap “Play Highlights” above the recent videos section. While watching a clip, you can also switch to the next highlight video by swiping across to the left on your smartphone screen.
If you like a particular replay highlight, you can tap on the white info bar beneath the clip and it will take you to the precise moment in the broadcast that you were watching. To return to the highlights reel, all you have to do is hit the close icon, located on the top right of the display.
“We look at a variety of signals to determine what parts of a replay should be included in a highlight and will continue to improve these signals over time,” Periscope wrote in a blog post. “We hope that highlights make watching multiple replays an easy, engaging, and seamless experience.”
Highlights will be rolled out to iOS and Android users over the next few days. Android users, on the other hand, are getting exclusive access to auto-play live broadcasts before their iOS counterparts. The update will see live-streams play automatically in the watch tab, and global feed without sound when you open the Periscope app. The feature will also be made available to iOS users at an unspecified date.
Periscope’s parent company, Twitter, is also getting a slice of the update action thanks to the option to embed tweets that contain Periscope streams across the web.
