Oliver at MobileCrunch has posted an exclusive first look at the newly launched mobile video site Veeker. The service catches mobile video clips sent by MMS then delivers them to contacts, public and personal pages. A series of short clips can be subscribed to by RSS and feeds of clips can be played automatically in an embedded player on another site. In other words, I record video from my phone, send it through Veeker and it appears in a player on my website. YouTube does support incoming video from phones, but there’s quite a few steps that would need to be taken to reproduce the kind of functionality that Veeker promises.
Critics contend that mass market extensive use of mobile video is unlikely. Obviously Veeker is a company betting otherwise. I won’t comment on the long term likelihood of widespread mobile video creation, but I will say that I am impressed by this company’s aims.
Oliver goes into much greater detail about the service and the executive team is particularly significant. At least two (Roger Raderman and Alex Kelly) are guys whose previous companies have been acquired for large sums. I can’t help but compare Veeker to sites like Twitter or Dodgeball, but Oliver is thinking bigger. He’s of the belief that there are business uses of the technology. I think that with just a little imagination, a service like this could make a lot of things possible. Quite simply, Veeker makes it easy to incorporate near real-time video as one part of a whole website. Check it out over at MobileCrunch.
Isn’t this mobile video blogging..or whatever it is called?
The built-in Messaging application on my Treo won’t send videos larger than 256K. I am not sure if this is an arbitrary application limitation or my network’s limitation (Sprint “Power Vision”).
Most of my phone videos are at least 1MB. I shoot at 352×288 because postage stamp footage just doesn’t really do it for me.
Is my phone in the minority or are “Veeks” really intended to be ultrashort?
” high profile stealth mode” i love that line….i just wanted to see some veeks; especially young girls gone wild…veeks. but it made me join; and i’ve seen enough of those.
Perhaps something like this would work once the mobile market is further developed here in the US, even though this type of service will be commoditized. The problem for Veeker is that the state of mobile technology in the US lags the rest of the world and mobile video has failed to take off so far. Timing is important for any startup, unless the company has no financial limitations and can wait to see if the market develops. Assuming that Veeker is a typical startup, it might just be too early.
Not sure that what they are building is more then just a feature set. There are other sites out there that allow pushing video or photos from mobile phone. If it is the social net aspect that makes this exciting, one should question just how easy creating these types of social networks is becoming with tools like Ning. I just played with some of their latest tools and this type of thing can be created pretty quickly or so it appears.
Interesting. I would think that the news sites that invite citizens to send in video clips of news they see happening (lots of local tv stations do this throughout the country) would be interested in this as the video could then be received and uploaded quickly from mobile phones, but I am too tired this morning to think through whether or not I’m right about this.
Patricia,
Great idea about using mobile video for citizen journalism. We (at Veeker–I am Chief Marketing & Product Officer) completely agree, and in fact are launching a program next week with YouthNoise, which is a social network built around teens dedicated to social change.
The program, called “VEEK the Vote” encourages (and enables) teens to get involved on November 7 by using the video cameras in their mobile phones to communicate their experiences on election day–at their local polling stations, political rallies, protests, election day parties and any other election-related activities or events.
Kids can sign up at YouthNoise.com, and, using the VEEKERplayer, deliver their Veeks (”video peeks”) from the day, right to their profile pages, along with those from other teens around the country. The Veeks will show up in the VEEKERplayer 15 – 60 seconds after they are sent from phones.
This kind of coordinated effort to get teens nationwide to become citizen journalists using the video cameras in their phones hasn’t been tried before. It’s a bit of an experiment, but one we hope will lead to good things, and more of this type of behavior in the future–like in 2008!