Periscope, the new livestreaming application from Twitter, has just received a new update which lets users pick streams using a realtime map interface.
You can now view countries from all around the world and see at-a-glance how many people are streaming in each location. The map is fully interactive and can be zoomed and manipulated, so you can zoom in on individual cities and towns. However, these features can only be used if you enable location sharing.
This new feature makes it much easier to find streams that are in your locale or worth watching as the accuracy filters down to street level, but it also raises additional concerns for privacy. If you’re streaming from home, it’s now dangerously easy for users to abuse the service so they can find out your home address.
Also, it won’t be enough to stop the tirade of piracy that currently cripples the reputation of the service, as most users engaging in such activities will just keep the feature turned off to avoid detection. Even more problematic, the update makes video replays instantly available after a stream is finished, so a pirated stream can be re-watched! So, while it brings exciting new features to the platform as a whole, it probably creates more problems than it solves.
On the plus side, at least they have added support for an additional 29 languages meaning the app should be more universally appealing (and even more lucrative for pirates). This whole post seems to be very appealing to pirates. I’m starting to wonder if there is any legal benefit to this update after all…
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