Drummond Puddle Watch: Periscope of Newcastle pool watched by tens of thousands of people on Twitter livestream tool

The footage of people attempting to cross a puddle is just one of a range of viral livestreams, which have tended to show more serious breaking news

The puddle, as seen on Periscope

Twitter’s Periscope is seeing tens of thousands of people flock to it to watch people stand next to a puddle — a big change for an app that usually covers protests and tragedies.

The stream — named “#DrummondPuddlewatch” — is the latest and perhaps one of the most talked-about livestreams on the service, which launched last year.

Periscope is intended as a video tool that allows anyone to broadcast from their phone. Anyone can download the app and begin a stream almost instantly — and the feeds can also be watched online.

The footage of the Newcastle flooding was mostly amusing in its banality — it mostly showed people attempting to cross the small puddle and get towards a main road. But the tool has been used for a huge range of serious broadcasts.

The app was launched in March, 2015. Its first major feed was videos of a fire that struck New York that evening — and the app quickly got a reputation for being a way of following breaking news events.

But it also had a reputation for events like the puddle from the off. When it launched, many people used the app just to show off things around them — and perhaps one of the most popular forms of video was people showing the inside of their fridges.

It also set off a slight competition between it and Meerkat, a very similar app that launched just before. But Twitter’s integration with Periscope appears to have done away with its rival.

Since then, the app has been used to show live feeds of people on Hajj to Mecca, as well as protests and events across the world. It has also been used as a way of getting around broadcast bans — including by people who have used it to stream Premier League football games and new episodes of Game of Thrones.

The company announced in August that it more than 10 million people were on the service and that more than 40 years of video were being watched per day.