Periscope Shuts Down, Six Years After Popularizing Live Streaming On Mobile

Periscope, the app that popularized live streaming from smartphones, is shutting down today, just over six years after its launch. The service has already been removed from the app stores and most features will no longer be accessible after today.

The live stream will be broadcast inside Twitter, which has owned Periscope since March 2015, just weeks before the service launches. Twitter announced the impending shutdown in December, saying usage was declining and the app had been in an “unsustainable state of maintenance mode” for some time.

The Periscope website will remain online with an archive of public broadcasts. Periscope users will still be able to download their data via Twitter.

Live streaming became an overnight phenomenon in March 2015 with the debut of Periscope and another app called Meerkat. Although Meerkat was released first, Periscope was able to quickly dethrone him with support from Twitter and become the leader in live streaming.

However, the phenomenon seemed to subside just as quickly. Facebook has pushed live streaming heavily on its own service, and no platform has developed a dominant community around the feature. In December 2016, Twitter added the ability to live stream directly from its own app, removing much of the need for Periscope as a standalone service.