SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/528894
S X S W. C O M | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 5 | S X S W o r l d 4 9 REGISTER TO ATTEND TODAY AND SAVE! A Boutique Event for Startups to Learn, Connect and Grow Keynote: Brady Forrest of Highway1 Keynote: Dave McClure of 500 Startups Keynote: Damien Patten of Banjo There is an appeal to that, even for people whose careers are based on a curated, edited experience. One of the early adopters of Periscope is Ellen DeGeneres, who uses the service to show planning meetings, and to stream from the set during commercial breaks. Even the talk show host's biggest fans are probably getting enough of DeGeneres, but getting a different kind of look at her has its own appeal. "We had a meeting recently when we were talking about it with our staff—why would I watch Ellen when I can watch Ellen?" Gallaga recalls. "But there's something powerful about seeing them in the moment. It's ephemeral—it's in the moment, and then it's gone." As all of this develops, the services themselves seem to be busy trying to stay on top of the networks they're developing. Getting anyone from Periscope or Meerkat on the phone to answer questions in the first two months of launch is a serious challenge, and people within Periscope, when asked what they expect to see from the ser- vice's users, have a tentative, wait-and-see approach. Still, the sort of best practices that Gallaga and Oleander describe seem to be coming down as conventional wisdom, even in the first several weeks since launch. Periscope co-founder and CEO Kay von Beykpour told CNBC on May 6 that "the most compelling Periscopers are really interactive with their audience," mentioning a broadcast from NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield during which a viewer asked him to recreate his famous "Space Oddity" performance from aboard the International Space Station. "One of the viewers made that happen because they asked," Beykpour noted. "The magic experience of Periscope is not knowing that it's live—it's knowing that you can affect the experience just by asking a question." Gallaga notes that live streaming helps people develop a reactive stream of consciousness, where they read, answer questions, and talk as they do whatever else they're doing in the video. And Oleander says that being responsive in that way—doing all of it at once—is something that really only comes up through live streaming. "My life has completely changed after Periscope, because even though I definitely Periscope a couple of times a day, a lot of the time I'm by myself any way. Let's say I'm painting—I'll just multitask and put it on," she says. "It comes very intuitively to me—it's very weird how all of the little things come together and make Periscope." A m a n d a O le a n d e r C E N Z O L