Twitter buys video chat service Squad and may shut down Periscope

Twitter has taken over video chat service Squad. The existing service will be discontinued almost immediately and the company’s employees will all transition to Twitter. The amount involved in the acquisition is not reported. At the same time, Periscope seems to be stopping soon.

The app allowed one-on-one or group video calling or screen sharing. There was also support for parties and rooms and there was a desktop app, TechCrunch writes. It is not known why the Squad app will not be integrated into Twitter, but the site speculates that it has to do with the intensive use of the Snap devkit that Squad used. That may make porting the application to the Twitter platform too difficult.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem to be going well with another video-focused Twitter purchase: Periscope. Jane Manchun Wong, a well-known reverse engineer, states that she is in the code of the Twitter app references towards the discontinuation of the platform’s Periscope live streaming feature. She also speculates that this may be related to the Squad takeover. The two apps partly fulfill the same role. Periscope has been off Twitter since 2015 and is now called the platform’s go live feature.