Periscope comes in peace.
That was co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour's message to broadcasters on stage today at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in New York City, where Beykpour spoke at length about how his live streaming app Periscope can work with and not against traditional media companies like HBO and Showtime.
The discussion is a timely one. Periscope has had some well-publicized issues with users live streaming copyrighted content, including this weekend's endlessly hyped boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. In live streaming the fight, Periscope users were able to circumvent the $90 fee that HBO or Showtime were charging. It wasn't the first time this problem arose. Periscope has had similarly well-publicized issues with HBO, thanks to users streaming pirated episodes of Game of Thrones on the app.
This time, however, Beykpour says the Periscope team was better prepared. "We had a team of people who just look at an email channel, and if someone says this stream is copyrighted, we take it down," he said on stage. Over the course of the night, he says, the team received 66 take down requests and ended up removing 30 streams within a matter of minutes. The rest had already ended.
Periscope is legally obligated to respond to these takedown requests in a timely manner under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But that isn't the only reason the company needs to be proactive about stopping pirates. The other reason is Periscope also can't afford to burn bridges with mass media companies, because Twitter, Periscope's parent company, depends on them.
Twitter has been courting the television industry for years, offering up Twitter as a perfect vehicle for amplifying existing programming, knowing that the more television companies invest in marketing on Twitter, the more engagement Twitter will get. Piracy on Periscope could pose a direct threat to those relationships.
Of course, there's an argument to be made that when it comes to copyright infringement, Periscope, which offers a suboptimal viewing experience at best, should be a low priority for media companies. And yet, it's still in Periscope's best interest to keep television partners happy, and that requires doing more than responding to takedown requests, one by one.
Beykpour admitted as much on stage, acknowledging the fact that in a world of constant connectivity and instantaneous sharing, it's critical for the industry as a whole to rethink how it deals with piracy. "Generally, there’s a lot of innovation to be had. The sheer fact that the DMCA process mandates that you respond to these requests within 24 hours isn’t very relevant in a real time setting," he said. "The proliferation of all these devices, and the fact that I can take my phone out now and stream changes the landscape of how a process like that has been done in the past."
He didn't give much detail about exactly what Periscope is doing to reinvent that process, except to say that the startup is eager to work with media companies on developing tools that will make it easier for people to access content without having to pirate it. He pointed to iTunes as a good example of how an easily accessible tool was able to stem the bleed of digital music piracy a little over a decade ago.
"If you make it easy for people to have access to content, they will use it---iTunes proved that," he said. "It’s not a Periscope thing. It’s an internet thing. Piracy’s been around forever, and I think making it frictionless for people to have access to the content legitimately will help everyone."
