Bhaskar Roy - co-founder of Qik. (Foto: Frank Barth-Nilsen)

Bhaskar Roy – co-founder of Qik. (Foto: Frank Barth-Nilsen)

Qik is one of my all time favorite mobile applications. Today I met co-founder Bhaskar Roy in their headquarters in Redwood City outside San Francisco.
Qik offers live streaming from different cell phones. About 80 percent of their user base is regular people, streaming live from weddings and other sort of events affecting their lives. The other 20 percent are various sorts of broadcasters or journalists, making up for about 80 percent of the traffic. According to Bhaskar Roy, more and more broadcasters are getting their eyes up for this way of communicating with raw authentic content. But many of them also find ways to use Qik streams on ordinary TV. Using solutions like SDI cards for moving the web streaming to main stream TV. Some of the larger companies using Qik is CBS and BBC.
Qik welcomes major broadcasters and will try to help them integrating it into the content flow.

Transparency

But you will also see that other organizations find this type of direct streaming on the mobile platform useful. Congressman John Culberson use Qik to stream from various meetings and events to promote transparency in Congress.

The biggest suprise for Bhaskar Roy was when the Vatican started using Qik. It wasn’t the pope, but people working in the Vatican. The World Economic Forum has also started using Qik for press conferences, to let people outside of the forum asking questions.

HD is growing

Mobile phones is getting better and better. Screens have higher resolution, CPUs are faster and more and more phones have high definition cameras. Qik will support this. Some of the best phones for making high quality streams today is Nokia N-series, Samsung Omnia HD and the new Motorola Droid. But Bhaskar thinks new phones from Sony Ericcson will provide some of the best quality. Just monitor my blog and I will try to give you some insight when they arrive. I may also add that Loic Le Meur from Seesmic mentioned that he has high hopes from new phones from both SE and Nokia. Maybe the two major manufactures haven’t gone in hibernation when it comes to development after all?

Going freemium?

Qik is a young company, but has some long term investors. They still really haven’t come up with a way to make money, but some sort of freemium model seems to be imminent. I’m hoping this will ad some new functions to the service, and not only limit existing users if they don’t pay.

Not live on the iPhone

As you may have read – the iPhone app released in the Apple App Store will not let you stream live from Qik. For some reason, the guys at Apple don’t think that’s a good idea and will not allow it. Feel free to let Apple know what you think about this in the comment field. If anyone from Apple would care to elaborate on this, it would be nice.

Like Bambuser, Qik has also got a client on Cydia which is capable of streaming live. But then you have to jailbreak your phone. If you are not at technical user, don’t try to do it. If you are, search for “blackrain”.

The next thing for Qik is opening up for streaming from gaming platforms. Several of the gaming consoles have support for web cams and Qik expand their service to these platforms.

A big thanks to Bhaskar Roy and Qik for welcoming and meeting up with our group of Norwegian journalist on a study trip to San Francisco.