There certainly is no shortage of avenues for sharing your adventures. Social media has driven technology to the point where everything must be quicker to share, make you look better, and of course be as simple as possible. As far as the “media” part goes, nothing is more efficient or simple than watching and broadcasting something live. So until now, even your hi-def, high intensity, highly awesome looking GoPro footage required the ancient process of transferring video to a phone or computer before showing it all off for the world to see. And that could take minutes!
We were such cave men back then.
Now, thanks to a partnership with GoPro and the mobile app Periscope you can watch people charge, or broadcast your own session, live. We caught snippets of this at ESPN’s Winter X-Games in Aspen last week (if you were using Periscope, that is). “The integration with Periscope provides GoPro users with a great, realtime platform to share their content,” GoPro President Tony Bates said in a press release.
This means on the slopes and in the skate park, athletes will be broadcasting their sessions live with ease. As for surfers, since the mobile app requires a wifi connection between the camera and the broadcaster’s phone it will take a little more jerry-rigging and ingenuity to get the Average Joe’s waves live on social media. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to think an entity like the WSL could have those obstacles sorted out by the time the ‘CT hits the Gold Coast, and reach an even wider audience in 2016. Currently, the baseline requirements for this GoPro/Periscope combo are a Hero4 and an iPhone 5s or newer device. An Android release of the Twitter-owned app is expected in the future.
