Periscope partners with drone maker DJI and finally adds a search feature

Periscope launched a bunch of new features for its livestreaming app on Monday, including a partnership with DJI so that more people can livestream video directly from their drone.

The drone integration is a first for Periscope, which already has a partnership with GoPro. (Some lifehackers were trying to work around this by strapping their GoPro to their drone, says Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour. No longer necessary!)

Finding these drone and GoPro videos is another part of the update — Periscope is launching a search feature so you can actually find videos by hashtag or topic. Periscope doesn't offer any kind of search for live video at the moment. You can search for broadcasters by name, but actually finding videos about the topics you are interested in was a crapshoot. The update will let you "find your tribe easier than you could before," Beykpour explained.

The last part of the update, and most important, is that Periscope finished its feature that will let users save videos forever instead of expiring after 24 hours. It addressed this issue publicly last week with a temporary save solution. Now it says the option to save videos for good will be available to everyone in Settings over the next few weeks.

I suggested last week that a longer shelf life for videos would entice more brands and big-name publishers who put time and resources into content and don't always want it to disappear. Beykpour agrees — kinda — but says this feature wasn't built specifically for big-name broadcasters.

"Broadcasters want more control around their content and that's true for celebrities and media companies but also for the [everyday] user," he said, adding that the limit wasn't stopping these broadcasters before.

These updates from Periscope are the latest in its attempt to fight off Facebook, which took an interest in livestreaming around mid-February and has been pumping out features incredibly quickly ever since. Periscope won't say this out loud, of course, but any time you have Mark Zuckerberg breathing down your neck, it tends to inspire a little extra urgency.

All of these updates will be pushed out to users over the next few weeks, Beykpour said.