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Periscope users can now save their live-streamed broadcasts forever

Periscope users can now save their live-streamed broadcasts forever

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Periscope's live-streamed broadcasts have become a lot more permanent. Users of the Twitter-owned app can now choose to save their videos forever, CEO Kayvon Beykpour announced on the platform last night, changing the previous policy that saw broadcasts disappear after 24 hours. Users who want to keep their live-streamed broadcasts can now put "#save" in the title to keep their videos online forever, disappearing only if they choose to delete the entire video at some point in the future.

Users need to put #save in their broadcast title

The feature is now available to all users as part of a public beta test, Beykpour said, with Periscope soliciting feedback from its users on how it works. The CEO said that Periscope had been "actively building support for controlling how your broadcasts stay" on the platform, including keeping broadcasts for longer than the previous 24-hour window, but also to service "some people who want their broadcasts to be deleted more quickly." The introduction of the new #save feature comes amid a host of recent changes to Periscope, and as Beykpour also bade farewell to Katch, a third-party app designed to solve the problem of disappearing Periscopes by saving them and posting them elsewhere that folded last month.

Like Snapchat before it, which introduced Stories and news feeds on top of its self-destructing messages years after its release, Periscope's introduction of a save feature shows the app moving away from the kind of impermanent in-the-now ethos it appeared to be designed for. But it's also answering the direct demands of its users, who can look at competitors like Facebook Live at any time, rather than hoping to catch something cool inside a restrictive day-long window.