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. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
Tomorrow Qik, the popular webcasting service that streams video from your phone, will announce support for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform. Actual support for phones will be rolled out in the coming months. To get things started, the site has launched an invite-only alpha for the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. We’ve got invites for the first 50 TechCrunch readers who email techcrunch@qik.com.
Qik is an ultra-simple video broadcasting system that uses a cell phone’s camera to record video, which is streamed live to Qik’s servers. Viewers can watch the live streams from embedded players or from Qik’s site, and all content is archived for future reference. The service has turned into an essential tool for many people, even some unlikely ones - Robert Scoble, who declared that he was “only using HD camcorders” back in 2006 recently has become an an avid (and decidedly non-HD) Qik user: He recently used the service for an important interview with Twitter’s founders, defending himself by saying that he would have never been able to get the interview in the first place had he been dragging around his HD camcorder.
Up until now Qik has only been available on Nokia smartphones based on the S60 platform. Qik says that they plan to gradually introduce support for all Windows Mobile phones (presumably with a camera and high speed data plans), though they haven’t offered a timeline for this. The Windows Mobile platform represents an absolutely massive increase in the potential userbase for Qik - Microsoft expects to sell 20 million licenses in 2008 alone.
We’ve grown to love Qik at TechCrunch: the service is ridiculously easy to use, and quality is usually surprisingly good for video that has been streamed over a cellular network. We used the service earlier today to live-stream an interview with Gmail project manager Todd Jackson, and earlier this month we used it to stream Bill Gates’s keynote at Advance08.
Qik has a number of competitors in this space, including Flixwagon and Kyte.
Greg Kumparak from MobileCrunch had a chance to sit down with Qik to talk about the partnership - Check out MobileCrunch for the interview transcript.
Update: Mike just interviewed Qik’s co-founder Bhaskar Roy using the service. Check out the embedded Qik video to get a sneak peek at the software running on a Samsung BlackJack.
As rumored earlier this week, live mobile video streaming service Qik has raised $3 million in Series B funding from Marc Benioff, Arjun Gupta, and George Garrick.
Qik allows users to stream video from their camera-enabled phones to a number of platforms including TV, gaming consoles, and the web itself. Currently only a subset of Nokia phones work with Qik, although the company has plans to support all smart and Java-enabled phones.
Justin.TV will today start offering live mobile streaming to its users via a tie-up with Qik.
With the new service, Justin.TV users will have a option to stream from a mobile phone directly from their control panel without the need to have a Qik account. The integration is seamless, and the only difference in the video feed will be a Qik logo somewhere on the screen.
Qik has grown rapidly since first launching in invite only alpha testing. Despite not being open for signups, the service has over 2000 regular users (Scoble and Calacanis among them) and is growing at approx. 20% a week. Justin.TV needs little introduction, having created the live streaming genre and gone on to become a highly popular service.
I spoke to Justin.TV’s Michael Seibel and Qik’s Bhaskar Roy prior to today’s announcement. Justin.TV sees the deal as a value add for its users that gives it an edge over competitors. I mentioned Qik’s partnership with Mogulus and Seibel said that Justin.TV doesn’t see Mogulus as a competitor, noting that while their focus is on webcams and quick to use and stream shows, Mogulus is focused on high quality, TV level productions. Roy said that Qik sees the partnership as another way to get their service out to more users, and that after their testing phase they are ready for the growth the Justin.TV deal will bring.
Amsterdam based LiveCastr, a service that lets users live stream video from their mobile phone, launched today at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It joins a parade of competitors that have launched over the last couple of years, including Mogulus (not mobile), Qik, and Flixwagon among others.
Davos was a good venue for launch - founder Ralph Cohen has already captured live videos with Larry Page and Bill Gates while roaming the halls.
The main difference between LiveCastr and Qik is that Qik requires a software download to the phone - meaning that only a handful of handsets can currently be used with the service.
LiveCastr has both a software solution as well as allowing users to make a simple video call with their phone. The video call is lower quality, but it works with virtually all European 3G mobile phones and many U.S. ones as well, without the need to install any additional software. Streamed video can be viewed on the LiveCastr site or via an embeddable widget.
While LiveCastr just launched, the company has been providing mobile services for some time via their IceMobile site. LiveCastr is currently in private beta - request an invitation on their home page.
The post below is written by Robert Scoble, a top blogger and the founder FastCompanyTV.
The main difference between LiveCastr and Qik is that Qik requires a software download to the phone - meaning that only a handful of handsets can currently be used with the service. 
