Hot on the heels of its competitor Qik, mobile video service Flixwagon has released an application for the iPhone 3G that allows users to stream live video from their cell phones. Qik released a similar application for the iPhone 3G yesterday. Unfortunately, like the Qik app, this will only work on jailbroken (hacked) iPhones, which severely limits the potential user base.

Here are the instructions if you’d like to install it:

-On Cydia, make sure you refresh all ‘Sources’ under the ‘Changes’ tab, and then Install Flixwagon from “Sections/Multimedia”.
-On installer 4: make sure you refresh ‘Sources’, and then install Flixwagon via “Categories/Multimedia”. The app is also available via Community resources like iSpazio.

Apple’s ban on applications using the iPhone’s camera is just one of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions the company is placing on developers. What makes the restriction especially annoying is the fact that the camera is actually designed to capture video. Some users speculate that the lack of a sanctioned video app may be because of Apple’s concerns with the iPhone’s already lackluster battery life, while others believe that the phone’s developers don’t have it very high on their priority list.
Update: A developer I’ve spoken to says that the camera buffer is simply a part of the phone developers are not given access to yet, but that this likely has more to do with creating a sandboxed environment than Apple explicitly forbidding video apps.

Either way, the fact that Apple is rejecting applications that have significant demand and no malicious qualities has frustrated users and developers alike. Apple’s lack of communication and hazy Terms of Service may cause the App Store to stagnate, as developers become wary of creating something truly innovative only to have it rejected.

Notably absent from the race to get streaming video to the iPhone is Kyte, a direct competitor to Qik and Flixwagon. Kyte may be trying to avoid any disagreements with Apple, as it already it has an Apple approved application available in the App Store (which can only handle images, not video).

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Well-known blogger Robert Scoble, who once said that he would “only use HD camcorders”, has become one of the new services’ most vocal supporters. Last month he predicted that Kyte would eventually overtake the competition, based on its interface and devices that support playback.

What he neglected to analyze was the audio and video quality of each service, which are obviously key components of media streaming. So we’ve decided to put them to the test. We’ve recruited Sarah Austin of Pop17.com, who has helped us record the same interview four times (once with each service). The questions may get a little repetitive, but at least the videos are easy on the eyes.

We’ve done everything we can to make the tests as consistent as possible. Each video was shot using the respective app’s highest quality setting on the same Nokia N95 smartphone. And we’ve used the same location, lighting, and Wi-Fi access point for each test.

Qik

Qik began testing in November 2007 with support for a limited number of Nokia smartphones. In March the site annouced a partnership with popular lifecasting site Justin.TV. The number of phones supported remains limited, but the site has recently announced support for the Windows Mobile platform (though only on a select number of phones so far), and the release of a version for jailbroken (hacked) iPhones. Qik has raised about $4 million in funding.

Video:
Audio:
Player:

Kyte

Kyte opened its media distribution channels in April 2007, but it wasn’t until almost a year later that it launched its streaming video service. Kyte has managed to recruit a number of big-name celebrities like 50 Cent, who prominently features the player on his homepage. Of the services tested, Kyte has by far the most funding, having raised a total of over $23 million.

Video:
Audio:
Player:

Flixwagon

Israel-based Flixwagon launched in a limited private alpha in January, and opened its doors to the public earlier this month. Like Qik, the company has also released a version for the iPhone, but it too is for hacked phones only. Flixwagon only has around $1 million in funding, and is reportedly seeking a second round.

Video:
Audio:
Player:

Livecast
Livecast (formerly known as ComView) supports Windows Mobile 5/6 and Symbian S60 phones. We began this experiment with the intention of comparing four services, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get Livecast to work. We successfully got the video to upload to the site, but Livecast’s video player is little more than an embedded .mov or .wmv file that never played. We managed to download a video file that worked locally, but that sort of defeats the point, doesn’t it?

Conclusions
We’re going to ignore Livecast for this comparison, because we couldn’t get its player to work at all.

In terms of video quality, Qik and Kyte are clearly a step above FlixWagon, with Kyte barely edging out Qik for the top position. FlixWagon seems to be using more compression on its videos, giving some shots a pixelated look that is especially obvious when there’s movement on camera. Kyte also seems to do this too to a lesser extent, but it’s nowhere near as bad.

Audio is another close call, but we think that Kyte takes the top spot here, too. Qik’s audio comes through clearly, though the volume is a little faint, while Kyte seems to have the ideal mix of loudness and clarity. FlixWagon comes in last – its audio has a very tinny quality that leads to an irritating staticy sound.

Preference in the embeddable players will largely come down to a matter of taste. Qik’s player has the best styling, but it lacks the embedded chat features that are found on Kyte (Qik has a chat button in the player, but it doesn’t seem to do anything). Again, FlixWagon falls short in this area – it’s overly simplistic player is neither stylish nor feature-rich.

What none of these services can offer is native, Apple-approved support for the iPhone, which is easily the most user-friendly smartphone on the market. The first app that can do this (if it’s even possible), will likely become the standard in mobile broadcasting.

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Among the new features, users can now register and download the client software through Nokia Symbian Series 60 mobile browsers. Before broadcasting, users can specify whether to increase video quality or decrease delay. With new two-way text chat, broadcasters can write back messages to the comments area that appears during a broadcast from their mobile device. They can also change title videos during broadcasts and enjoy digital zoom-in and zoom-out.

Post-broadcast features include a group-sharing option, where broadcasters can specify which groups they want to share videos with (friends, family, coworkers, etc.). They can also post to Twitter and YouTube with personalized messages.

Changes made to the Flixwagon site include the addition of RSS to users’ broadcast feeds, as well as an option to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, etc.

Flixwagon was the first streaming service to announce support for the iPhone (albeit, only by a few hours). It competes most directly with Qik and Kyte.tv (see Robert Scoble’s analysis of the mobile video broadcasting space here).

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Robert has been one of the earliest adopters of cell phone video, which offers the ability to stream live to the Internet, with the primary tradeoff being relatively poor video quality. He’s extensively tested all of the major emerging services in this area, including Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon, among others.

This is a post I didn’t want to write. Why? For the last six months I’ve been using Qik’s live video service off of my cell phone. I’m the top user there, with most views, most videos, and all that. I’ve used that service to take videos inside the first production Tesla, Annie Leibovitz as she showed us around her latest photos of famous people, Google press conferences, Ansel Adams’ son at the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite, Bono at the World Economic Forum, and more than 700 other videos as well.

Qik has done something remarkable: it put a TV studio in my pocket. I can get live video onto the Internet faster than I can make a phone call (Qik takes two clicks to start streaming, a phone call takes 12 clicks on my phone’s keypad). Even better, while doing a video you can watch live and you can send text chat messages to my phone while I am filming. While we were racing around Santa Monica in Elon Musk’s new Tesla (he’s the chairman of the board and was giving us a killer demo) we had hundreds of people watching my cell phone along with Jason Calacanis’ phone, which was shooting the same view from his Corvette alongside. As Elon was driving we had hundreds of people asking questions about the new Tesla. This was interactivity the world had never seen.

At the same time a company in Israel, FlixWagon, has been competing with Qik. I liked FlixWagon too. The quality on their video was slightly better than Qik’s although I went with Qik because they had a better live experience, at least on my phone. Other cell phone videographers, though, like Sarah Meyers loved Flixwagon. When I visited Israel recently I interviewed the Flixwagon guys and they are whip smart and really nice too.

Which gets me to why this is the post I never wanted to write. I have been treated absolutely wonderfully by the Qik team. They call me often, make sure I’m having a great experience, and have fixed many of the problems I have been having as I push their service into places it simply wasn’t really designed for. My interview with Annie Liebovitz, for instance, was done in a museum that had absolutely no wifi or cell phone service. So, I used up every bit of memory on my phone and gingerly carried my cell phone back outside where it started sending information again. I’ve had AT&T’s 3G service die right in the middle of many of my interviews (most troublingly right in the middle of an interview with Sun Microsystems’ CEO Jonathan Schwartz) and Qik got on those problems quickly.

Anyway, back to the fight between Kyte, Qik, and Flixwagon over your cell phone video experience. Last year I was Kyte’s top user too. Why did I switch to Qik? Because I saw that cell phone video would let me extend my brand into places no other video network was letting me get to. I was the only one doing cell phone videos from the World Economic Forum, for instance, something that got me a lot of attention and followers. I told Kyte’s CEO, Daniel Graf, tons of times over the past seven months to get video streaming into his product. At first he resisted, thinking it wasn’t that big a deal, but on Friday I finally tested it out on my cell phone and was impressed enough to give Kyte a second look.

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.
2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.
3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.
4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.
7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

Why do I say that Kyte’s distribution system is stronger? Well, the Kyte.tv player has some significant advantages over the Qik one.

1. When embedded it can be set to play the latest video, or a specific video. Qik can only play the specific video you embedded in (I hear they are changing this, but even if they do the second part makes this not as useful). Flixwagon’s gadget lets you show your blog’s readers other videos you’ve done, but not the chat.
2. The chat room is always the same. This makes interactivity much quicker on the Kyte.tv video player. Many of my Qik videos don’t have any comments, or only have one or two. This makes those videos seem lame. Compare to Kyte, though, where everyone talks about you all day long, and it is a better place. Plus Kyte’s chat is much nicer and can contain video and audio comments (Qik can only have text comments) and Kyte’s can come from Facebook or other Nokia phones. Major win for Kyte here. I love participating in Kyte’s chat room from my cell phone because I can leave audio comments. I’ve gotten in some interesting conversations done with nothing but audio from other people. Audio is a lot easier to do from your cell phone than text or even video, particularly if you have a crappy cell phone camera or you don’t want to look like a dork out in public holding the cell phone up to take video of you.

3. I like the Kyte player on Facebook better than anything that Qik or Flixwagon has done yet. Kyte’s can be branded to yourself and you can make your own customized Facebook app for your own Facebook profile. So, TechCrunch can have its own Kyte app, which is much better for branding purposes.

Add all these together and I don’t see how Qik or Flixwagon can beat Kyte anymore in the cell phone video game. What do you think?

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Not to be outdone by competitor Flixwagon, Qik has just released its own demonstration of live video streaming from the iPhone (see below).

The demo comes just hours after Flixwagon made a similar announcement. However, Qik is one-upping Flixwagon by promising to release its software next week, not further off in July. It will presumably work only with jailbroken iPhones as well, at least until the app store rolls around.

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Seven months after we first saw video on the iPhone in action, Flixwagon appears to have beaten its better-known rival Qik to the punch by getting its streaming video service to work on unlocked iPhones (or at least by demonstrating to the public first that it has done so).

Qik is undoubtedly looking to support the iPhone but has so far been rather noncommittal. Perhaps it was waiting to see whether the new generation iPhone would have native support for video so the company wouldn’t have to hack its still camera functionality (which Flixwagon must have done since neither the current nor forthcoming model records video).

Don’t expect to see Flixwagon iPhone support rolled out to alpha testers until early July, perhaps when the official app store goes live on the 11th. If you’re interested in broadcasting from your iPhone or any other device, you can email Flixwagon at techcrunch@flixwagon.com and they’ll give you priority access to the service.

See the video below for a demonstration of Flixwagon on the iPhone. All iPhone broadcasts can also be found here.

Update: Qik has counter-punched by promising to release its iPhone support next week.

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Let’s start with the bad… FlixWagon has a terrible name, and has an equally ineffective logo to boot. Neither name nor logo help in communicating the company’s true offering: Allowing anyone with a 3G/WiFi mobile phone to broadcast live video directly to the Web. No wagons are involved in the process.

The good news is that FlixWagon’s technology is far superior to its branding. The most important aspect of a cell-to-web offering is wide support of mobile handsets. FlixWagon supports most Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets. The mobile client application, which users must download, is 76Kb for Symbian and 218Kb for J2ME phones. FlixWagon executives are confident this covers the gross majority of GSM handsets.

The mobile app is designed simply but effectively in order to provide users the shortest path to broadcast. It’s not mandatory, but users can edit video properties from their phone, such as title, tags, category, and access rights (public or private). The mobile app also provides live feedback from viewers (see the screenshot on the left).

Second to handset support in importance is video quality. I had a chance to see FlixWagon in action on a few occasions and was impressed by video that came out on the Web clearer than I expected. I also saw videos uploaded using the same mobile handset to both Qik and FlixWagon. Subjectively speaking, I felt that FlixWagon was superior. This was true both in video clarity and its ability to deal with movement—quality was degraded substantially on Qik when the handset was moved even slightly. FlixWagon is claiming that this is due to the emphasis it places on ensuring that a user never loses a second of broadcast, even in the most challenging conditions inherent to mobile environments. For example, if a user goes into an elevator, basement, or loses reception for any reason, the broadcast will resume when reception is back and the full video will be stored and available for later viewing.

FlixWagon.com acts as the service’s portal, allowing site visitors to browse through live and stored broadcasts. Social aspects include broadcast alerts to friends and family and auto-uploading to video and social sites like YouTube and Facebook.

FlixWagon has partnered with MTV Israel to enable reporters and subscribers to broadcast live video from their mobile phones directly into a social network to be launched within mtv.co.il. (See also what MTV Israel is doing with regular Web video). I wouldn’t be surprised to see FlixWagon integrated across MTV’s global Websites sooner rather than later.

FlixWagon will be giving TechCrunch readers priority access when it launches its Alpha in January. Sign-up here.

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