Periscope uses plenty of battery power

I went up to the nursing home today to see mum and while I was sitting in her room I decided to talk to her about the Periscope app from Twitter, which I wrote about a couple of days ago as an introduction for prospective users and just because I wanted to get to know it better myself. In that blogpost I talked a bit in fairly broad detail about how to use Periscope. Having done that blogpost it was easier today to use the app again. What I want to briefly mention today however is how Periscope uses battery power.

Today I watched for about five minutes a broadcast sent from Seattle where some people were protesting in sympathy with the Baltimore rioters. I then made a video of mum talking which ran for about five minutes, while streaming the video to Periscope and announcing it on Twitter (as described in Sunday's blogpost). After that I replayed the recording of mum talking while sitting in her chair so that mum could see the video herself, and she watched the whole thing through on the iPhone as we sat in her room.

While using Periscope I noticed that the iPhone got very hot. But the really surprising thing about the iPhone by the end of all this video activity is that I only had about 17 percent of battery charge left. I always charge my iPhone at night so when I wake up in the morning it has a full charge. I arrived at mum's nursing home before 10am this morning and apart from a bit of checking of emails and use of Facebook and Twitter Periscope was the only app I used.

So I don't see traditional video cameras going out of use anytime soon, since you only get about 10 or 15 minutes of broadcasting, let's say, with an iPhone 4 and Periscope.

When I got home I tried to follow my own instructions from Sunday and email the recording from the phone to my computer but because the video is so large it would not let me send the entire video this way. Instead, I sent the video direct from the iPhone to YouTube, and the iPhone lets you type in a title for the video while you're on the phone, before you transmit the video, so that process worked fine. The video is below.