I’ve been hounding Periscope for a beta copy of their software from the moment I heard about it. It didn’t help. Thank goodness (for them and me!) they released the program today and I was able to start testing it without bombarding them with any more bad poetry.

Curiously enough, I found out about Periscope as I was attending a conference on “Proximity Journalism” at the CosmoCaixa Auditorium in Barcelona. Live-streaming video seems a key component of proximity journalism, in my opinion.

For those of you who don’t know, Meerkat and Periscope are applications which permit streaming video from the iPhone, and which permit some levels of sharing through Twitter.

I haven’t yet tried Periscope out beyond Wifi coverage, but I’ll do that in a few minutes. For now, here’s what I’ve found, including similarities and differe.

Another important difference is that Periscope allows landscape recording (that is, using the entire width of the phone), while Meerkat always records/plays vertical video even if you are holding the phone horizontally. This has an interesting effect: while you can’t manually zoom either program’s video, if you record Meerkat horizontally you get a zoomed in effect with respect to portrait mode, since the image is cropped and zoomed to fit.