Periscope CEO: Nobody Wants to Watch 'Game of Thrones' on Periscope

Periscope has a piracy problem, but the live-streaming app's CEO isn't worried.

"We have processes in place for this and a copyright team that's on 24/7," Kayvon Beykpour, Periscope's CEO, told me as we chatted on a bench outside a coffee shop in Manhattan Tuesday. "If a rights holder reaches out to us and says a piece of content is violating their copyright, we're able to respond to that and we did so in the case of the Pacquiao and Mayweather fight in a matter of minutes."

Beykpour was referring to the much-hyped boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao on Saturday, during which many Periscope users illegally livestreamed the event off of their TVs, broadcasting the $100 pay-per-view event for free to other users. It got a lot of people talking about what new live-streaming apps like Periscope and its oft-compared competitor Meerkat might mean for the increasingly irrelevant cable television business.

But Beykpour told me he doesn't think Periscope (which is owned by Twitter) necessarily poses a threat to traditional media, though it may force them to change. He told me he's eager to work with big companies to find a better way than just trying to chase down potentially thousands of users to remove the content after the fact.

"From a consumer standpoint, history has shown that when you make things more frictionless for consumers to legitimately purchase content, they do. iTunes and the music industry showed us that," Beykpour said. "There's a lot of innovation to be had around the model. The pay-per-view model is archaic and it wasn't particularly easy, if at all possible, to purchase the fight on a mobile device."

He also said he felt like the fight was a unique event and not something that the average user is interested in using the platform for regularly. The team has seen users adopt the technology in ways they never expected—like one person who crafted a handmade, mini Wheel of Fortune and played a live game with strangers who tuned in—but live-streaming pirated TV shows and films isn't the big winner, according to Beykpour.

"Who wants to watch Game of Thrones on Periscope?" he said. "I love Periscope, but it's not the way to watch that show. Yes, the internet is a big place. Someone will do this and it's probably going to irk the rights owners, but I don't see the world saying 'I'm going to stop watching HBO on my high definition TV to watch on Periscope.'"

Of course, giving anyone with an iPhone the ability to instantly broadcast themselves to the world introduces another hornet's nest: pornography. Users have already been spotted broadcasting their genitals and sexual content, despite the fact that Periscope has a strict no "pornographic or overtly sexual" policy. Right now, if Periscope is alerted to any sexual content, it's immediately removed, but that only creates another tail-chasing situation.

Beykpour said they're just not equipped right now to allow for any sexual content, which would need to be clearly labelled and filtered from minors, but he said so far it hasn't been an overwhelming problem. For now, he's just happy to see people using the app and finding creative ways to use it.

"The excitement is of a very different kind now," Beykpour said. "We're in this really fun experimental phase where it seems like the world is embracing Periscope in a really awesome way. We're glued to our computer screens just seeing what people are doing."

And if they want to avoid any major troubles in the future, they're probably going to want to keep watching closely.