Periscope is a great video streaming service but it’s still not so great for actually finding interesting things to watch.
Dextro, a video and picture analysis company, has built a useful little site that scans Periscope in real-time to find interesting streams to watch by detecting what’s going on automatically.
The site uses the company’s video analysis API to scan for scenery, people and objects to help surface something a little bit different. It also provides trends about what’s been popular on Periscope according to its analysis.
At time of writing, the site says that 46,000 streams over the last week were people talking to the camera, 14,000 were of crowds and 11,000 were users walking around a city.
Dextro was launched as a photo analysis company in 2013 by Sanchit and David Luan. It expanded to video last year with an API that can detect objects in live or pre-recorded footage.
Luan told TNW that scanning Periscope in real-time presents a huge technical challenge as it requires huge scale to capture streams in real-time. As Periscope doesn’t have a public API yet, the site scrapes Twitter for streams.
We’ve covered other sites that help surface Periscope streams in the past, but this is different as it analyses the video in real time to detect what’s going on.
If you spot a stream you find interesting on the site, you can easily jump straight in and watch it. I’ve used it for a few hours now and found it quite addictive dropping into the different happenings on Periscope with ease, rather than just ending up in streams of people talking to the camera.
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