Periscope: A scope for amateur journalists

Every human being has this basic instinct to share information with his or her peers and sometimes with the entire globe. In earlier times, news was primarily spread by the word of mouth, then came the idea of using human messengers, sending letters or scrolls via trained birds or other pets, which then evolved into the concept of printing newspapers and finally all of this led to the creation of the most popular and preferred form of journalism, called Broadcast journalism.

Broadcast journalism, as defined by Wikipedia is the field of news and journals which are “broadcast”, that is, published by electrical methods, instead of the older methods, such as printed newspapers and posters. Broadcast methods include radio (via air, cable, and Internet), television (via air, cable, and Internet), and, especially recently, the World Wide Web. Such media disperse pictures (static and moving), visual text and/or sounds. Today there are several thousand news channels in all the developed and developing nations like the USA, UK, EU nation’s, Russia, China, India, Australia and Japan.

In the past two three years or so, the concept of professional and especially amateur online journalism has evolved a lot. Thanks to the internet, the common man has all the necessary platform to start his/her own website or blog or YouTube channel to showcase his/her talents. Now, speaking of online journalism, about a year ago twitter decided why not build a free platform to enable everyone with a smartphone to live stream their surroundings through their own perspective. And voila Periscope was born with an apt tag line:

"Explore the world with someone else’s eye"

It has a similar relationship with twitter like what Google+ has with Google, to the extent that all twitter accounts have a periscope account that is waiting to be enabled by its holder/owner. Now looking at the periscope app, it has a very decent UI (user interface) and is loaded with umpty number of features. One can stream live videos of their surroundings, search for streaming’s of other users, like or comment on the video of other users and also follow other users whom’s content catches their eye. I downloaded the app about a month ago and this is what was waiting for me:

I personally think that this app is pretty great with a very neat UI and my overall experience on this app was pretty satisfactory. It allows me to live stream the interesting things and events that happen around me. The only problem is that; for streaming videos, a pretty strong internet connection is needed and if you are in a country like India where there is no fast public WiFi or no public WiFi at all, this could pose as a major setback. But looking on the bright side, all of us can stream the cool things that surround us on several occasions and also view the cool things that surround many others around the globe, at the comfort of our couch or office chair or a park bench.