Elon Musk continues to revamp Twitter.
The billionaire is stepping up his efforts to find sources of revenue for the platform, which he acquired for $44 billion at the end of October.
He wants to turn Twitter profitable even as some advertisers have stopped promoting their products and services on the platform due to Musk's laissez-faire approach to content management.
He hopes to compensate for this by increasing revenue from subscriptions. He increased the price of Blue, and to encourage users to subscribe, Musk integrated the blue checkmark that confirms the identity of an account holder.
Individuals pay $7,99 a month while organizations are charged $1,000 a month.
Musk Goes Live
The tech mogul is also considering offering new services. Rumors point to payment services. And he has just confirmed what he had hinted in February: Twitter will resuscitate Periscope three years after having killed the live-video platform.
The announcement came via a live 4 1/2-minute demo on Twitter overnight. In a live that lasted nearly 4 minutes and 30 seconds, Musk appears live, testing the feature with engineers and Twitter staff behind him. The resolution is poor. The billionaire himself recognized that the product is nowhere near ready for prime time.
"What a fiasco!" Musk said in a burst of laughter. "We're just testing the live-video feature so you can see if it works."
He added: "So we need to improve resolution."
The video had been viewed by more than 10 million people at last check. Periscope's return was clearly generating a lot of excitement from Twitter users, despite the bad quality of the image.
"This was fun not sure if you noticed me pop in to say hi behind you quick hope it’s ok," one Twitter user commented.
"I wish this can be used by TV channels, so we can watch TV live on Twitter 24/7," added another Twitter user.
But overall Musk's live video was met with hilarity and mockery.
"Who do I contact to claim these 4 minutes of my life back?" mocked one Twitter user.
"The video quality is so bad though 😭" quipped another used with a crying emoji.
Periscope and Vine vs. TikTok
Twitter bought the Periscope application in 2015 for $50 million and $100 million, from the entrepreneur Kayvon Beykpour. At the time, the video startup was seriously incomplete: It was not yet available on Google's Android operating system, did not offer replay, did not provide sufficient shelf life and did not yet manage content filmed at 360. Over the months, these features will be added through updates.
Founded in 2014, Periscope had a difficult start because its application was used to make pirated broadcasts of content, such as the "Game of Thrones" series and tennis matches at Wimbledon. In fact, hundreds of videos were cut in the first few months because they violated the terms of service.
The reputation of the streaming-video app worsened when people realized that the very simple possibility of making live videos also potentially enabled hoaxes, gratuitous violence and encouraging suicide.
Positive uses also emerged. But on Dec. 15, 2020, Twitter announced that the Periscope app would be removed from Apple's App Store and Google Play in March 2021.
"Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while," Periscope team wrote in a farewell message. "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."
"We still believe in the power of live video to solve impactful problems, which is why we’ve brought most of the core capabilities of Periscope into Twitter. We probably would have made this decision sooner if it weren’t for all of the projects we reprioritized due to the events of 2020."
Besides Periscope, Musk plans to revamp another popular Twitter feature as well to attract creators and influencers on the social network. This is Vine, a mobile app that enables users to record and share short videos. The concept is simple and unique: six-second videos that run on a loop.
Vine is seen by Musk as a weapon against TikTok, the short-video platform owned by the Chinese giant Bytedance. It was discontinued by Twitter 1.0 In October 2016.
