Here’s a quick one – Periscope has announced that their live-streaming monetization option, Super Hearts, is now being made available to both French and English language broadcasters across the EU regions, the U.S. and Canada.
Welcome! Bienvenue! Starting today, we’re opening the Super Broadcaster program to residents of the US, EU, and Canada who broadcast in French or English. pic.twitter.com/IrbrIsRhKz
— Periscope (@PeriscopeCo) March 1, 2018
Persicope launched their Super Hearts program last June – the program enables viewers to purchase special heart graphics which can then be applied to their favorite streams. The money from those purchases is then shared with the streamer, enabling a direct revenue connection between broadcasters and fans.
Periscope hasn’t revealed data on how popular the program has been, but the expansion would suggest that there’s some demand for it. There have also been reports that Periscope, as a platform is on the decline and facing various content and audience challenges, but with no official usage information, it’s impossible to know where, exactly, the Twitter-owned live-stream platform currently stands.
Live-stream monetization has proven very popular in China, where live-streaming is now huge, enabling many Chinese streamers to build businesses on the back of the various available platforms. YouTube introduced their own ‘Super Chat’ viewer payment option in January last year, which they recently updated with new discovery and monetization options.
Given the prevalence of Facebook Live and YouTube’s streaming options, Periscope, despite being one of the first cabs of the live-stream rank, would now appear to up against it, so initiatives like Super Hearts are important in helping the platform grow. But with Twitter integrating live-streaming direct into their platform at the end of 2016, it’s also difficult to know what the future holds for a separate Periscope app.
Maybe, through Super Hearts, they can build enough of a creator eco-system to justify that separation from the main app, and the continued development of Periscope as a platform. There’s still a lot of potential in live-streaming, particularly among skilled broadcasters, but it does seem like Periscope has become a lesser consideration.
In this sense, the Super program could be a make or break proposition for Periscope as we know it.