More and more mobile phones offers HD recording and playback. Sony Ericsson Vivaz is one of the latest. The Vivaz offers video recording in 1280 * 720 – 24 fps. And yes, it’s really 24fps – not a dynamic recording rate. From what I have seen – it’s a step up from Samsung Omnia HD.
When I visited San Francisco last year, major players like Qik and Seesmic told me to watch out for new phones from Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. And it seems like they where right.
Another major shift is that the stream cast companies are offering better and better quality on HD streaming. With a phone supporting 3.5G network – the quality is starting to get acceptable. Qik has even launched a premium feature, making it easier to download HD clips and burning them to DVDs. From Bambuser I’ve seen really impressive HD quality streams.
The shift towards higher quality streams has a least two major impacts on news outlets and journalist. The first one is that they will find more and more shareable quality video made by audience on the web. The second one is that stream casts will be a more viable way of sending high quality recordings home to office. If you have a large social media network – it will even be a great platform for stand alone publishing.
But in order to make the most out of this shift in technology, a shift in mindset among journalist have to happen. Most of the journalist I know are uncomfortable with showing people their stuff if it isn’t finished. They don’t like stream casting if the stream could be considered raw material. Well her is a newsflash. If you look at pages from Qik, Bambuser, Ustream, Flixwagon and others – you will quickly realize that most people don’t give a damn. They are used to stream cast to preserve and share a moment, even if it might be a little rough in the edges. If you put it in the right context, the audience will understand. What they won’t understand in the future is why you don’t offer stream casts if you are present at an happening.
To the skeptics – yes you are right – your streams can’t all be low quality and shitty. In the right settings, you’ve got to be able to make a good storyline, frame a good picture – and produce good sound. But you have to start somewhere. In the age of social media – I believe most people will forgive you for not being a pro in the beginning, but they will appreciate that you are trying. So pick up your phone, hit the button and STREAM! If you aren’t happy with the result, try again. Don’t give up. It will only get better.
If you want higher quality from Ustream, they also have an app for recording in higher quality. It is not live stream, but will connect to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Bhaskar Roy – co-founder of Qik. (Foto: Frank Barth-Nilsen)
Transparency
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.
Qik is simply my favorite mobile streaming app because of all of its viral possibilities. Besides the live streaming at your Qik page, you can push your content to nine more channels. And it is increasing. Today Qik offer viral spreading to:
So with a touch of a button, you can spread your content to large networks. In each network you can set up further viral spreading to other sites and services, making your possibilities almost endless. I guess your imagitation sets the limits.To make it happen, sign in to your Qik account, hit “Edit profile” in the top right menu, go to “Networks” and enter your account details for the services you want to add your live streaming to.
Just remember one thing. If you for example set up viral spreading to YouTube, you have to manually turn the spreading off when you don’t want to publish something automatically. Or else, your stream will be transported to YouTube as a file as soon as you are done streaming. In my opinion, a brilliant evolution for Qik would be to offer their customers to turn viral spreading on and off in the mobile client.
I especially like the possibilities for streaming through your own channel at Mogulus. The most brilliant part is that you can set up several mobile phones to stream in the same channel. With minimal knowledge of TV or streaming, you can produce a multi camera event. The participants don’t even have to be in the same country. It’s simply amazing. I hope to be able to try a Live World Cast one of these days. So far I’ve got reporters in:
- Norway
- Denmark
- Holland
- Australia
I would still like someone from Asia and America.
To configure your Qik account for Mogulus streaming, simply enter your credentials and the name of the Mogulus channel. The owner of the channel simply has to add you as a production member.
As you may have seen, in Mogulus you can make an embeddable player. I you wish to add this to your blog, you can then stream your live streams, no matter what sort of content management system (CMS) you use. On my own Mogulus channel I’ve got a loop of clips from YouTube running in the live channel. But the minute I start to stream from Qik, the live mobile stream automatically takes over my Mogulus channel. When I turn off the streaming from the phone, my loop of clips is back on again.
If you don’t want to use Mogulus or any of the other services, you can also embed your last clip or live feed on your own page. This is also possible on Bambuser and Flixwagon.
For my part I’ve set up Qik to send a message to Twitter each time I start a live mobile streaming. If you have a large crowd following you on Twitter, this is a great way to let them know you are producing. If you follow my tweets, you will see that most of the time I’m livecasting, it’s when I hold a demonstration for journalist or their bosses. It’s in Norwegian and usually pretty boring to watch on screen. It is a you-got-to-be-in-the-room-to-enjoy-it sort of presentation. But if you work actively as a journalist, I believe these combinations of possibilities are golden. You can target your crown in many ways. For my own part I can see that every time I publish a new post on this blog, I get around 40 visitors the next five minutes. My blog has a small niche with pretty nerdy stuff. I guess if you report from more mainstream subjects you could have great impact from connecting your production to Twitter. It’s all about recruiting people to follow your tweets. I’ll write more about Twitter and tweeting in my next tutorial.
The next thing you can do is to let your mobile stream go from Qik to YouTube and then to your blog. In your account setting on YouTube, you can set up pushing from YouTube to your blog. You can also let YouTube announce your new video to a mailing list.
I’m pretty amazed that we don’t see more mainstream newsrooms using these possibilities to report breaking news. When I puzzled with these issues last year, I thought that newsrooms worldwide would embrace and be the foremost advocate for this type of live coverage. My thought was obviously wrong. I just think it’s stupid that larger news organizations use a vast amount of their resources covering a lot of silly breaking news. Instead they should focus on freeing up resources for digging out important and exclusive coverage of issues their competitors doesn’t know about. Either I was way too early in my predictions or major news organizations are on their way to burn all they’re money on petty news, letting citizen journalist dominate these platforms.
Bambuser has one advantage over Flixwagon. Their streaming system can produce multiple mobile phone streams in one channel. Pretty much the same way you can use Qik and Mogulus. My biggest problem with Bambuser lately have been that their servers seems overloaded, producing streams with bad quality. My own company is already using Polopoly. It will be exciting to see how much the streaming addendum will cost and how an in-house solution will effect the quality. My guess is that the swedes are back in the race again, competing with Qik and Flixwagon.
Kyte.tv is now offering live streaming for mobile phones. At present this service is only available for beta testers, but I guess it will be a part of their public service pretty soon. I’ve applied for a beta tester status and will bring you a report when I get the chance to test it. Kyte.tv already has one of the best solutions for on demand video. It will be exciting to see if they can surpass the quality from Qik, Flixwagon and Bambuser. It will be interesting to see if Kyte.tv will be able to offer viral solutions like Qik and Mogulus offer. In my opinion it will be crucial for mobile stream companies to offer viral video solutions other than pure embedding.
What should a mobile streaming service from YouTube offer? Let’s give them som help develop a good service for MOJO’s!
Flixwagon is a contender to Bambuser and Qik. Recently they set a new record in partnership with MTV’s Jonas Brothers. With more than six million streams in 36 hours and amazing 90.000 comments making it one of the more successful mobile streaming events this far.
According to Flixwagon a number of MTV bloggers and reporters made live videos directly to the MTV site and TV studio using mobile phones running the Flixwagon application. Even the popular brother’s was video blogging from the tour.
I’ve made a couple of streams with Flixwagon and so far I’m not that impressed. I still think Qik and Bambuser provides a better quality. I guess MTV have installed their own Flixwagon server, making sure that their own streams get better quality. The streams made during the 36 hours blogging experiment from the tour gives excellent quality. I’ll be back with an more in dept test of Flixwagon later. Love to hear about your opinons about Flixwagon…
Jonas Brothers – Live & Mobile
Flixwagon Blog about the record