Last night I got a firsthand glimpse of a very cool video streaming app from startup Qik.
Qik is a mobile streaming video service with a social angle that is currently available for Nokia and windows mobile phones (see their site FAQ). However, they are developing the service for use with iPhones and what I saw last night was that alpha in development.
On the iPhone, the app is activated from an icon link and from there you hold your phone like a camera while recording video that is stored on the qik.com site for you or other users to view. When we tested it last night, our stream happened to load up on their front page as a currently running stream - so we were watching our stream in real time (about a 3 second delay) - very cool!
Using the iPhone 1.0's lens optics and processor, the video quality was good but not great (about 5-7 fps, quality dependent on ambient lighting); however the audio was surprisingly good (kudos to the iPhone mic?). Besides seeing ourselves on the qik.com homepage, we were also immediately able to access the file created from a directory of videos just created. Making and viewing a video was a seamless, instant user experience.
From a content distribution POV, this service is even easier to use than YouTube and like the site says, will have a million uses. Like YouTube, there is already a global user base (check out the integrated geotagging for videos). Already on the site are quite a few known 'lifecasters' and podcasters, ranging from pro to (extremely) amateur. Another great feature is live chat. It's the most elegant implementation of "video+phone" I've seen yet. I'm not sure if their iPhone app will be as robust for viewing as for video creation (e.g., the YouTube app on the iPhone) but we will see.
Color me very, very impressed with this service, its implementation so far and its potential impact on our media culture that is rapidly changing to bottom-up and many-to-many. This is going to be big!
http://www.qik.com
Jay Bain
Strategists & Planners