Periscope's new 'mute' feature quietens users who stream too often

Periscope's been out for four months now, so chances are, if you're an avid user of the live-streaming app, you've found a few other users whose broadcasts you enjoy.

In its relatively short lifetime, the mobile software has come on leaps and bounds in terms of usability and features, with the latest update, rolled out on Monday, addressing a particular issue that's evidently been bugging a number of users.

You'll know about it if you've enabled push notifications for the app and follow someone who's a particularly enthusiastic streamer. In this case, every time they crank up the app to start a new live stream, you'll receive an alert on your phone, a situation that could become a little annoying depending on just how often they launch a new broadcast.

Turn off notifications and you stop hearing from all the people you follow on the app, yes, even those whose streaming frequency has never been an issue. With this week's update, the problem's sorted.

Mute

Initially for iOS but coming very soon to Android, "mute" lets you block notifications on a user-by-user basis.

Team Periscope elaborates: "When you mute someone, their broadcasts still appear in your feed, but you won't receive push notifications when they go live. Push notifications are a powerful communication channel, but they also have the potential of creating a frustrating degree of noise for users. We think it's important to respect this power, and give users granular control over the notifications they receive while still providing the flexibility of seeing more content on Periscope."

This should be a great feature for managing Periscopers whose streams you enjoy but whose constant notifications cause mild irritation (or extreme distress, in which case you should simply stop following them).

Besides the new mute function, the update also brings an improved global feed for discovering live streams around the world and, for broadcasters, stream stats that remain viewable instead of disappearing soon after finishing a broadcast.