A new app has the potential to take The Gator Nation everywhere.
Twitter released its new Periscope app Thursday, and it allows users to stream live video directly from a smartphone and display it to anyone in the world. The app, which is currently only available for Apple products, has already created buzz on the UF campus.
Bhavika Swaroop, a UF health science sophomore, watched UF’s Periscope account broadcast a video of Lake Alice over the weekend.
“You could hear the birds chirping and you could hear the water,” Swaroop, 19, said. “It was pretty cool.”
Ryan Morejon, a social media specialist at UF, said he had been trying to get his hands on the app for a few weeks. He said the UF social media team signed up for the beta version, but they never got an invitation.
They were on the lookout for it until they heard it was live in the app store Thursday.
Morejon said the beta version would’ve allowed UF to test Periscope before it was released and find possible glitches.
However, Morejon said the social media team has been having fun playing around with it.
“There’s so many possibilities with live-streaming, so we’re trying to figure out what we can do,” he said.
In the future, Morejon hopes UF can use Periscope to live-stream major campus events such as Dance Marathon. He said strategizing how to use the app and getting more users engaged will make events more special.
“It becomes a really awesome, interactive, immersive tool to use,” Morejon said.
Anyone in the world can tune in to UF’s live streams, including alumni.
“Let’s say I’m an alumnus who hasn’t been to Gainesville in five years,” he said. “I can go to a live stream of Turlington at its busiest hour, and it’ll take me back. There’s a nostalgia element to it.”
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 3/31/2015 under the headline “UF social media team scopes out new video streaming app”]
