First look: Qik video streaming from cell phones
I just met up with Bhanu Sharma, director of product management at DVC Labs. He used to work at Macromedia where he was product manager for Breeze, webconferencing service, and entrepreneur in residence working on VoIP. We’re at the Burlingame Apple Store where Patrick is getting a new iPhone cause of his dead battery. That’s very cool for Apple! Good service that exceeds what I expected to have happen.
Anyway, Bhanu recognized me and introduced himself. He’s building software for mobile phones but we can’t talk about that yet cause he’s in stealth mode.
So, he was showing me his E61i Nokia phone and said “check this out.” Clicked on an icon titled “Qik.” Then said “I’m streaming live from my cell phone.” Here’s the video we just did. OK, OK, this freaking rocks. I signed up for the closed preview.
He showed me my video playing on a nearby Mac. LIVE. Then when he turned off the app it kept a recording.
I asked him if TechCrunch or anyone else has written about it yet (it’s run by friends of his). He said he didn’t think so (a quick Google search couldn’t find anything). Said “I think they wanted to keep it quiet.”
Oh well, that’s what happens when you hang out in Apple stores on Saturday night. Hope their servers stay up. Here’s a picture of the three of us talking, as taken by Dave Winer.
I’m definitely going to use this. Thanks Bhanu for telling me about it!
UPDATE: NewTeeVee actually had this last week but didn’t see it live in action like I did tonight.
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December 15th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
hey Robert
Newteevee wrote about this last week. its pretty cool.
December 15th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Hey dude,
I did something similar for an X-AIR event where users could video/Pxt things they liked at the event and push them through onto the big screen live at the event.
http://blog.xsive.co.nz/archives/195
Worked out pretty cool, but the technology was a bit early. We overloaded the cell towers pretty quickly at the event, even after the extra bandwidth we had ordered. I think the guys at QIK are onto something if they can build a good API for republishing the content.
C.
December 15th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Hi Rob,
Sorry, I’m getting a real sense of being dumb, what am I missing!
Isn’t this just mobile life-casting, aren’t there others, isn’t this part of the inevitable mobile future…
Kind regards,
Shakir Razak
December 15th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
So they are replacing Patrick’s iPhone? I take it this isn’t a general policy for anyone having battery problems?
December 15th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Sina: yeah, it’s general policy. At least it sounded like it to me. Patrick took care of it while I was talking with Bhanu.
December 15th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Shakir: this is the first streaming video solution I’ve seen for mobile phones. Live streaming, that is. Have you seen others? Please point them out. Thanks.
December 16th, 2007 at 2:18 am
Is askimet over-working, my comments keep getting eaten?
regards,
Shakir
December 16th, 2007 at 4:37 am
shure there are others… http://www.comvu.com/comvu/Company.htm for example does it since 2005 and has won several prices since then. what, you didn’t know that…? ;-)
December 16th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
These guys do live streaming from phone directly to Flash which is way better than ComVu, which does Windows Media or Quicktime.
December 16th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
I am invested in a company that is capturing video for mobile phones, but the founder does not think the market is here yet because 3G penetration is so low and he is developing and deploying in China.
December 16th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
HI Francine,
What company would that be.
Robert,,
A company that’s been long established, seems to have a whole packaged solution, but completely off the radar (imho) is Forbidden Technologies. If you google “Forlive” you should see a press-release way back from 2003!
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
December 17th, 2007 at 7:06 am
There is also http://www.flixwagon.com which are going live soon. You can register to their alpha. I have and been trying it for the last week and it rocks!
December 17th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
My Buddy set up his verizon phone with ustream.tv and did the same thing a while back. Pretty cool stuff!
December 24th, 2007 at 9:33 am
[...] streaming video to/from mobile devices will mature and create a killer opportunity (Scoble is already messing around with Qik and comvu has had this for Windows Mobile for a while [thanx for [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:03 pm
[...] new video streaming service called Qik has been getting some buzz lately. If you’re familiar with UStream.tv, Veodia, and Comvu, the idea for Qik is [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[...] new video streaming service called Qik has been getting some buzz lately. If you’re familiar with UStream.tv, Veodia, and Comvu, the idea for Qik is [...]
January 10th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Hi Robert,
Please visit us and try our app. would be more than happy to hear your feedback. alpha.bambuser.com
January 31st, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] N95-3 about a month ago and then installed Qik to take streaming video after hearing about it on Robert Scoble’s blog. I have only shot a few videos, primarily of family activities and of me crawling around a [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
[...] like Robert Scoble’s preference of broadcasting live (I was doing this in [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 2:19 am
[...] to this, but Ive just signed for up (what looks like) an amazing service called Qik. Cheers to Mr Scoble for bringing it to my [...]
May 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
[...] recognized me and said “you’re going to want to see this.” I was amazed and wrote a blog post WHILE IN THE STORE. Then my next item was to beg to get added to the beta, which they did and now I’ve done more [...]