<div>For the past couple of days I’ve been “Periscoping” with Twitter’s new video streaming app. Not streaming my own activities – I don’t have the courage for that yet – but being a bit of a voyeur and checking out other peoples’ broadcasts. Periscope and Meerkat are two new apps and open to you if you have an iPhone, though they’ll turn up for Android devices soon enough.</div><div> </div><div>A bunch of techies I spoke to asked me what the big deal was and pointed out that video streaming had always been available. “What about UStream?” they demanded. What about Ustream is that no one knows how what or where to use UStream. With video streaming having been made as easy as pressing a button on your phone, everyone is, quite abruptly, a broadcaster.</div><div> </div><div>At the moment users are only just discovering and trying out Periscope and Meerkat. They’re comparing features, making wishlists of features, and bumbling about with video streams. You could easily get turned off as you try out these apps right now. For some reason, showing you the inside of a fridge has become a tradition already. You can see someone’s messy room, go along for the car ride to office or the walk back home, go weak at the knees at everyone’s cute puppies and purring cats, or listen to someone taking requests for karaoke. But already, the future possibilities are beginning to show up.</div><div> </div><div>As you get into the app and look at the feed of streams, you’ll also find you can all but attend presentations – as they happen – feel the buzz in a newsroom, look at how busy they are (or not) at an ad agency, and most incredibly, go along, from your place far away, with a reporter as he or she covers a happening. Sure, someone can just turn on Skype or something and show you what’s happening elsewhere, but not with this smoothness, not with this ease, and not out on Twitter for anyone to join in. In fact, when a stream is in progress, you can just use the comment box to ask questions or otherwise say something. I just amused myself with a stream in which a lady, for some reason, decided to show us her chicken coup. I spent a few minutes asking her things and reassuring myself she wasn’t going to eat them up and went on to the next thing – a view of the San Francisco bay from another lady’s house. It was beautiful and she laughed when I said she could just dream all day. </div><div> </div><div>What I’m getting at here is that participation is possible from across the world. The experience is somehow intimate, making it all the more powerful and really letting you see the world from someone else’s eyes. If a person chooses to stay quiet, it isn’t as much fun, of course. But if the person wants to interact, you have a powerful interaction going. A young man was driving home in Calcutta. On the way, he proudly pointed out new hotels, flyovers and other parts of the city. I remarked that he sounded very proud of his city and he said yes indeed, he was. He felt it was a place where there was more “bonding” than in other places in India. He considered himself very lucky to be living there and even luckier to be heading towards his new flat, close to the airport, in a nice green area. A few moments of this interaction made me feel happy for someone else.</div><div> </div><div>Broadcasting video has so far been something only professionals and tech savvy people could do. Not any more. Periscope and Meerkat are designed to keep all the technology away from the user and just leave him with a button to press. Then, position your phone, and you’re on the air.</div><div> </div><div>In the first flush of how much investment these apps have got, which one of them will survive and which not, and other nitty gritty, I don’t hear too much about how the use of video anywhere anytime is going to pan out. If people can use something, they can misuse it, and that’s where the fun begins. If someone had an iPhone, one of these apps, and a healthy internet connection, he could have streamed everything that happened inside that AAP meeting and we’d have known who beat up who. What happens when there’s a nice bribe in progress, and someone streams it all live, then and there? What happens if you’re in a movie hall and you just stream the whole movie out? A psychiatrist friend of mine is worrying about what the implications would be if one of his patients decided to video stream something at the clinic – perhaps involving other people. Could everyone’s privacy be in peril this way, just as it was with Google Glass? Will we constantly have to be on guard and be TV ready, doing only what we think is ok to stream live to the world? As you can imagine, there’s immediately no end of filming of women, dancing, parties, and intensely personal material. That’s side by side with all the fantastic boat rides, hike into the hills, interviews, access to people you’d never get a chance to talk to otherwise.</div><div> </div><div>As someone who’s always been intensely interested in new technology, I think the democratisation of video with one-button broadcasting is exciting. But as usual, one has to consider the serious flip side, specially as you can’t keep mobile phones out of everywhere and nor will video streaming apps go away easily, back where they came from, leaving the world as it was a few days ago. <br /><br /><img src="/image/image_gallery?uuid=1ddd51cd-7214-4208-90d2-5e8a60fdc2d4&groupId=36166&t=1427637989627" width="640" height="480" vspace="1" hspace="1" align="middle" alt="" /></div><div> </div>
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
