Bulletins

Twitter will shut down Periscope in March

The company will discontinue its live streaming app to focus on live video within Twitter itself, announced Twitter product lead and Periscope founder Kayvon Beykpour on Tuesday.

Periscope will be removed from the app stores in March, and users will be given some time to download their existing live streams. The creation of new accounts will be disabled with the next update of the Periscope app.

In a blog post, Twitter pointed to limited usage as the main reason for this decision. "The Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while," the post reads in part. "Over the past couple of years, we've seen declining usage and know that the cost to support the app will only continue to go up over time."

Twitter's decision to sunset Periscope is not a huge surprise: Notorious reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong recently found text in the code of Twitter's app that suggested a shutdown was imminent.
Janko Roettgers

Janko Roettgers (Twitter, Mastodon) used to be a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

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