“It’s a form of teleportation.”
Gerald spoke those words in his 2013 Nano News video, a seminal, defining articulation of the communications world in which we live.
When Periscope was announced last week, teleportation also was cited:
“It may sound crazy, but we wanted to build the closest thing to teleportation. While there are many ways to discover events and places, we realized there is no better way to experience a place right now than through live video.”
Why are we fascinated by live video? Is it like the car wreck on the side of the road? “We can’t believe THAT just happened!” Or the anticipation of what could happen live?
We’ve all been publishers with phones in our pockets for years now. The one missing element has been the ability to easily live stream video. Sure, we can live tweet and tell people what’s happening or we can record video and upload it somewhat quickly, but until Periscope and Meerkat were unveiled, live streaming wasn’t easy. It’s likely other live streaming tools will be released, but this live streaming ability is a game changer, asChief Bill Boyd points out — and in my words, it changes the truth about the new ground truth.
Fairfax County had some ground truth issues on Tuesday as a prisoner escaped from one of our hospitals setting off a nine-hour search. Our Fairfax County Police Department tweeted official information beginning around 5 a.m. Breaking news happens first on Twitter (and to some degree, police scanners, which thousands of people were tuned into as well). One tenet of our countywide social media strategy is to establish our voice and build confidence that we are a trusted source, especially during emergencies.
So on Tuesday, after a test run of using Periscope to stream cute puppies and kittens at our animal shelter a few days earlier, we fired up the teleportation app for a noon press conference with our police chief and federal representatives. Just minutes before it began, our police tweeted the news that our colleagues in the D.C. Police Department arrested the suspect as he exited a bus because an alert rider recognized his face from social media.
We had nearly 100 viewers of our live stream, standing side by side with national and local media sharing the news of the day directly with our residents. While we will never match eyeballs watching a local TV station, we see the potential of Periscope (or another tool) as a critical option when the situation is right (and that definition of “right” is a work in progress since we’ve been trying this tool for less than one week!). In this era of nano news, we have a responsibility (as resources permit) to use the tools of today to share — and now show — the ground truth live.
Five lessons learned from two uses of Periscope:
1.) To quote Apple and its often used phrase when describing new products, “it’s that easy.” You press “start broadcast” and you’re live to the world. However…
2.) Finding live streams that are useful or interesting is a bit of a challenge. Every time you refresh the app, a new order of live streams appears, so it’s unclear the chances of people discovering our stream if they did not already follow us. Also, if we’re searching for streams of, say, escaped prisoners, then those are not easily discoverable right now.
3.) As with any tool, there’s nuance and detail that must be paid attention to. Is your title descriptive enough? What will that title look like on Twitter? Are there hashtags and usernames? Practice, practice, practice because….
4.) Remember to press the Twitter bird before broadcasting so the link gets tweeted. Periscope, though owned by Twitter, asks streamers to actively choose to share on Twitter. We inadvertently did not select the Twitter bird for the press conference, therefore our live link did not publish on Twitter. We could have stopped the stream and started over, but the police chief had started talking. Once you’re live, there’s no way to share a link outside of Periscope, so that likely diluted our potential audience size. Ensure you’ve pressed the bird icon before streaming!
5.) It is hard to find streams outside of the Periscope ecosystem, especially the replay streams. There’s no way to share the replay with a link on Periscope and, of course, replays are only available for 24 hours. As far as I can tell, there’s no link to watch the replay stream outside of the Periscope app, so if you’re looking to save a press conference, tour or some other event for the record and posterity, then when the broadcast finishes, choose the option to save the stream to your phone and then upload the video to another site like YouTube, Facebook or Vimeo (which then poses its own set of challenges from a mobile device such as files too large to upload). You may need that permanent documentation and link to share in the hours after an incident.
Thanks much Greg for pioneering this and sharing with Emergencymgmt.com readers. If anyone else has an example of using live video streaming with Meerkat or Periscope, we'd love to share what you learned here. Email me at gerald.baron@agincourt.us.
