Twitter's Periscope livestreaming app gets 10 million users in first four months

Over 40 years of videos are being watched per day, company says

The Periscope app, pictured, appears to be winning the battle against its rival, Meerkat

Over 10 million people have signed up to Twitter’s livestreaming app, Periscope, in the four months that it has been around.

The app launched at the end of March, with the aim of letting everyone send livestreamed videos from their phone to the world. And now users are sending 40 years of video per day, according to Twitter, which owns Periscope.

Periscope said that the amount of time watched “is the metric we care about most,” because it tells it how successful it is for users and indicates how many people are actively using the app. It said that despite the huge numbers of active users, that metric wasn’t necessarily helpful since it didn’t want to grow in a way that didn’t lead to the success of the product or its users.

Periscope launched at the beginning of a rush for livestreaming apps, shortly after very similar app Meerkat. While the latter had much of initial publicity and popularity, Twitter’s app has slowly taken over.

Even Facebook is looking to get into livestreaming, according to reports. Verified pages — the owners of which get access to a special app called Mentions — will soon be able to send live videos to their followers, according to Techcrunch.

Alongside Periscope’s success have been some problems, including people using it to distribute copyrighted content.

Twitter announced the numbers alongside the fact that it was finally getting rid of the 140 character limit in direct messages. That change was announced some months ago but has at last been implemented, though doesn’t yet seem to have rolled out to everyone.