Twitter now lets you livestream without having to use Periscope

Twitter now lets anyone to broadcast live without installing Periscope on their iOS or Android device. Today, the company announced that its live video capability has become integrated into its apps, meaning that with just a couple of clicks, you can begin sharing a moment with your followers.

For a while now, Twitter’s app has featured a button to go live. However, when you press it, you’re directed to Periscope, the livestreaming app the company acquired in 2015. Now you can tweet, retweet, message, and livestream all from a single app. And, of course, viewers can also comment, send hearts, and do all the things they could have done in Periscope right in Twitter.

“We started Periscope because we wanted to give people the superpower to share live video with an audience,” explained Periscope chief executive Kayvon Beykpour. “Bringing this capability directly into the Twitter app is an important step because it brings that superpower to the hundreds of millions of people who use Twitter.

It’s not known exactly how many people use Periscope, but unless you had the app downloaded, the “live” button in Twitter was essentially useless. And even as Twitter was pushing a narrative of being live and sharing moments, its core app hadn’t really reflected that commitment. So now Periscope is essentially whitelisting its technology into its parent service to address that discrepancy.

For about a year, Twitter and its CEO, Jack Dorsey, have been investing in promoting live content, from letting people watch sporting events right on the site in real time to helping people instantly share their experiences with friends and family. And, as part of its strategy to build its user numbers, Twitter has been endeavoring to streamline its service for new and existing users. The feature announced today arguably meets both of these objectives, but is it enough to bring in more users?

Enabling live video natively brings Twitter on par with Facebook’s livestreaming feature, which allows you to begin livestreaming through a status update.