Twitter's new talk show

Yesterday, Periscope announced a new feature that lets you invite guests to participate in live broadcasts — like a talk show. 🎙

The Twitter-owned live streaming service launched audio-only broadcasts back in September, and this seems to be an extension of that. How it works: Once a person goes live, viewers can request to join the conversation, and then drop in and out at any time. It's reminiscent of calling into your local radio station — but you're calling into your favorite Twitter personality instead.

Guests will be audio-only for now, but Twitter says it's working on incorporating video into the shared broadcasts.

Of course, the idea of live broadcasts isn't new. There's already Twitter Live. And Instagram Live. And Facebook Live. And Dialog — a community dedicated to live audio conversations.

But Periscope's new guest feature may be more of a foray into “live podcasts,” marking the latest case in big tech going after the nascent podcast market.

There's already Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. And over the weekend, news broke that Spotify is in talks to buy podcasting network Gimlet for over $200M. 😳In January, Facebook launched its first U.S.-based podcast focused on entrepreneurship.

But we're still interested to see how the talk show concept plays out on Twitter — so we're going to do a livestream today to test it out. 😉

Go live with guests