Tech companies love to flood the internet with bizarre jokes, fake product releases, and phony news on April Fools' Day. But this year, one big piece of industry news is certifiably true: Pioneering social media app Periscope is shutting down for good, effective immediately, The Verge reports. Read on to see why the popular service is sailing off into the sunset, and for more important tech updates, check out Apple Just Released This Warning About the Latest iPhones.
Live streaming app Periscope is winding down operations.
According to a tweet from the company, April 1 marks the end of Periscope, the pioneering app that was one of the very first to popularize live streaming from phones. Most of the app's services are now no longer available to users and it can no longer be downloaded from major app stores.
"This is it. Our final goodbye. Today is the last day the Periscope app will be available," the app's official account tweeted on March 31. "We leave you with our gratitude for all the creators and viewers who brighten the Periscope community."
And for more groundbreaking tech going away for good, check out Apple Just Announced It's Discontinuing This Classic Product.
The Twitter-owned company has seen users dwindle in its own app.
Periscope became a sudden success in 2015 when Twitter acquired it to compete with Meerkat, the once-dominant live streaming app, Tech Crunch reported. But by 2016, Twitter had incorporated most of the social media service's functions into its own app, leading its parent company to announce in late 2020 that it would be winding down the standalone app and website.
"The Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while," the company explained in a blog post on Dec. 15. "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 probably would have made this decision sooner if it weren't for all of the projects we reprioritized due to the events of 2020."
And for more on how to protect your devices, check out If You're Charging Your iPhone Like This, Apple Says Stop Immediately.
You can still use Periscope's streaming feature through the Twitter app.
But fans of the service and anyone looking to keep the stream going will be happy to know that it will live on in one sense. While you may not be able to use the Periscope app directly, the feature will live on on Twitter's native app as Twitter Live.
"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," the company said in their farewell post. "The capabilities and ethos of the Periscope team and infrastructure already permeate Twitter, and we're confident that live video still has the potential of seeing an even wider audience within the Twitter product."
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An archive of old posts will still exist and users can download their data.
While the time to download your archived videos has passed, Periscope users also don't have to fret about losing all of their content. Anything posted through Twitter will still be accessible on the app as replays, Tech Crunch reports. And while the app will no longer function, the Periscope website will also stay online as an archive with access to public broadcasts from the service.
And for more on an electronics retailer that's also going away, check out This Beloved Chain Is Closing All Its Stores.
Zachary Mack Zach is a freelance writer specializing in beer, wine, food, spirits, and travel. He is based in Manhattan.Read moreFiled UnderApps • News • Tech and GadgetsRead This NextThis Streaming Service Is Shutting Down Next Month
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