Since the rise of YouTube and ever-increasing bandwidth, it’s obvious to anyone that ‘moving pictures’ have become a massive audience puller on the web.
Although there’s never been a cheaper or easier time to shoot and upload video, it would be fair to say the vast majority of online web video out there falls into one of two categories:
- TV/DVD content squished into the web
- Web cam’d heads in dimly lit rooms
Qik is a new service (still in alpha) that might offer an alternative style of content production. Designed to let you broadcast live from your mobile phone to the web, Qik runs as an installed application on your phone, transmitting your feed directly to your Qik profile page. From there you can automatically embed your latest video feed in whatever application you like, from Facebook to Wordpress (as I’ve done below).
Although this might be technically possible with Yahoo Live, YouTube and other video hosting services, I think the most useful and powerful thing about Qik is that Mobile-to-web is their complete focus. This keeps the interface simple to work with and easy on the eye.
Currently, it’s early days for the service, which explains the abundance of ‘Testing…Gee, it works!‘ posts on there, but it’s been interesting to follow long-time tech geek blogger Robert Scoble as he’s trialled the service through a number of recent tech conferences. The video is predictably a touch jittery, but I think the unslickness gives the footage a little bit of currency and energy.
The service works with most newer phones (my 18 month old Nokia works fine), but you would need a reasonable (ideally uncapped) data plan to keep the transmission costs down. Hopefully we’ll be seeing and using a lot more ‘Coming to you live from the…‘ web video in the near future (perhaps even from SitePoint…?)
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March 1st, 2008 at 11:36 pm
i.e - DON’T use this service from Australia, unless you hate your money.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:25 am
I don’t know about that, mike. Think I’m paying about $10 a month for 100Mb (I was a three early-adopter). A three minute burst of video on my phone might work out to be about 2-3Mb — wouldn’t want to do that every day, but once or twice a week a wouldn’t be an issue.