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Elon Musk dusts off Periscope for a quick video session on Twitter

It still works!
By Stan Schroeder  on 
Elon Musk Twitter
Live video streaming on Twitter is a thing again! Credit: SOPA Images / Getty Images

Elon Musk appears to have been serious about bringing Periscope back.

On Wednesday, the Twitter CEO did a quick video streaming session on Twitter, apparently using old tech from Periscope.

Periscope was a video streaming platform that began testing in 2014, creating so much hype that Twitter acquired it in March 2015, before it ever properly launched. The hype died down fairly quickly, though, and Twitter shut the product down(opens in a new tab) in 2021, citing declining usage and rising costs.

UPDATE: May. 3, 2023, 4:19 p.m. CEST It's worth noting that live video streaming is built into Twitter, so Musk may have been just using that.

In his impromptu Periscope session, Musk comments that the video is "pretty low-res," to which someone else (presumably a Twitter developer) says that they "haven't fixed it in like eight years."

"This is 2015 Periscope code," Musk says. "It basically works."

"We're just testing the live video feature so we can see if it works, and we can modify it accordingly," he says. "Just improve the resolution." Musk spends much of the video complaining about the onslaught of hearts showing up on the video, though the hearts aren't visible in replays.

Musk previously commented on Twitter's two video apps, Periscope and Vine, saying that some version(opens in a new tab) of both apps is "inevitable".

More in Twitter, Elon Musk

Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.


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