Periscope gains live-sketching feature, broadcasts come alive within Twitter for iOS

Periscope teaser 001

Wouldn’t it be great if you could doodle over live video broadcasts on Periscope? With Periscope’s latest iPhone app refresh, now you can! The latest version of the Twitter-owned app lets you draw with your finger on top of a live video feed in any color you want, like a boss.

Your drawings automatically disappear after a few moments, similar to the Apple Watch’s sketching feature, and remain visible on Periscope replays.

Doodling while broadcasting live

To get started, just tap and hold while broadcasting live and select the new Sketch option. As mentioned, you can use the three primary colors, or the dropper to pick a color from the live video to draw with.

”The Sketching feature makes it fun and easy for broadcasters to draw on the screen while broadcasting,” said Periscope.

It’s not just for fun: Sketching is valuable if you broadcast a lot on Periscope because you can easily focus your audience’s attention to specific parts of your broadcast. It’s especially nice that these doodles remain visible on Periscope replays.

A handful of other improvements

In addition to Sketching, this edition of Periscope includes half a dozen enhancement, under-the-hood tweaks and bug fixes. For instance, broadcast statistics have been improved with the addition of viewer and watch time statistics for all broadcasts.

Broadcasters can also see a graph of their viewers over time to find their broadcast’s moments with the most reach. Periscope user names can now be edited within the app, by tapping Edit on your profile.

A new toggle lets you disable video stabilization, which could darken broadcasts in low light conditions. An issue where the sun overlay was flipped on the map has been fixed and the app now warns you if it cannot access your Twitter account.

Last but not least, Periscope broadcasts can now be watched live within the latest version of Twitter’s mobile application for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Pricing and availability

Periscope requires an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with iOS 7.1 or later.

The app is also available on the fourth-generation Apple TV and is localized in English, Arabic, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Grab Periscope for free on the App Store.