Yahoo Finance Periscope CEO weighs in on Mayweather/Pacquiao pirating
Periscope is the hot app of the moment. Purchased by Twitter (TWTR) earlier this year, the mobile software allows users to stream live video from their phones to followers around the globe. It’s an extremely powerful tool that has drawn the ire of certain content producers who claim Periscope users are streaming their intellectual property.
Periscope has only been live for a month but in that time users have streamed the finale of the popular HBO show “Game of Thrones” and then last weekend did the same for the much ballyhooed boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
Yahoo Finance caught up with Periscope’s Co-Founder and CEO, Kayvon Beykpour, at Tech Crunch’s Disrupt NY and asked him about the inherent problem of piracy on his platform.
“Piracy isn’t new. Going into Periscope we have policies and procedures in place to protect against other people’s intellectual property rights. If a Showtime or a CBS (CBS) reaches out to us and says, ‘Hey, this piece of content violates our copyright,’ we are able to handle those requests in a really timely manner and we did.”
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But for every feed they were able to shutter, several more seemed to be popping up Saturday night. It’s an opening the young CEO sees for innovation.
“Real time video is a whole other beast compared to content that is uploaded to a website and can be analyzed after the fact,” he says.
Beykpour also points out that if given a seamless and legal way to consume content, consumers will use it. Look no further than iTunes (AAPL) effectively putting an end to the Napsters of the world back in the early 2000s.
The Periscope chief also notes that while the company worked with HBO (TWX) and Showtime to shut down feeds of the fight last weekend, those two media powerhouses also used his platform legitimately for special behind the scenes content before the fight.
The other big issue facing Periscope is competition. Back in March, Meerkat, an app that does much the same thing as Periscope was the talk of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Right around that time, Twitter snapped up the as yet unreleased Periscope and by the end of the month Periscope hit the Apple App Store.
With the backing of Twitter, Periscope seems to have leapfrogged Meerkat but the life of a startup is seldom that simple.
“It’s too early to tell whether it’s a winner takes all market,” Beykpour says. “Mechanically right now the apps do similar things but it’s early days. Periscope has been out for literally just over a month so we’ll see how they converge or diverge in the future.”
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