Periscope broadcasts decide to stick around for a while: 24-hour delete-timer gone

It used to be that the internet lasted forever: post something online, and there was a good chance someone would still be able to find it years and years later. But recently there's been a push towards much more ephemeral services, where postings permanently vanish anywhere from seconds to hours after they first go public – and Snapchat is the poster child of this movement. But as the way users interact with these services evolve, that same limited-time-window functionality that may have once been a blessing is occasionally being seen as a hindrance; what if you want the world to be able to enjoy your awesome post long after it's first published? That's exactly why Periscope has been making a big change to its archival policy, and today the app announced that broadcasts can now be kept in perpetuity.

Prior to this move, your Periscope broadcasts would be available for 24 hours, after which they vanished into the ether.

But then a few weeks back Periscope started testing the option to keep your videos much longer. While the new system worked, it was a bit cumbersome, forcing users to manually tag their broadcasts with a #save hashtag to avoid auto-deletion.

Today Periscope steps up to fully embrace the idea of videos that last, now saving broadcasts by default. Users are free to manually delete specific videos, or even toggle the “keep” option off in app settings. Otherwise, broadcasts will naturally stick around for as long as viewers want to watch them.

Will you be letting this new default option become your standard way of doing things on Periscope? Or did you really like the idea of your broadcasts always being fresh for their viewers, and you'll be disabling this feature as soon as you can? Let us know in the comments.


source: Periscope (Twitter) via MobileSyrup