The evolution of mobile reporting
Posts tagged Streaming
The HD shift is coming – are you ready?
Mar 14th
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.
Qik getting a grip on broadcasters
Dec 2nd
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.
Social media aids the protesters in Iran
Jun 17th
If you have checked out Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites today – you will discover that there is a lot of activity about Iran. For Twitter, simply search for the hastag #IranElection and you will be able to follow all sorts of opinions and information. The government has tried to stop media coverage of the protests, but that only seems to agitate the people questioning the results from the election.
It’s not surprising that a lot of people makes tweets. But a lot of video streams are also put out on the web. What sort of “aid” the producers have had, I’m not sure about. Neither who actually produces the videos, but you can watch a sample from LiveStream (former Mogulus) on Persianq. It’s a bit on and off with live streams and recorded streams. The quality from a lot of the streams seems to be from mobile phones. The new democrotatizers.
Get ready for mobile HD from Samsung Omnia
May 13th
Increased pictures sensors, higher resolution, faster Cpu’s and faster network. Mobile phones are getting more and more interesting as a tool for journalist. In the second half of 2009 you will find faster and better phones – making your mobile phone a good recording machine, even for breaking news on television.
One of the first really interesting phones are the Samsung Omnia HD. It delivers video in 1280×720 – 24 frames per second. Still images will be on 3264×2448 pixels. Combined with 7.2 mbps network capabilities. There are some confusion if the Omnia HD is delivered with a 600 Mhz or 800 Mhz processor. Anyhow, which that sort of processing capability – it’s basically a very small laptop. It will run on SymbianS60 v5, but it is theoreticly strong enough to run Linux. Since the screen is touch sensitive and there are no keyboard it’s not really an office phone, but others will come… The thing to notice is that mobile phone are increasing processing power rapidly. My guess is that within three to four years you will be able to edit recorded HD material on the phone. And if you can record HD quality out in the field, do an easy edit in the field or stream HD live, this will change the ballgame for television. Unfortunately the Samsung only comes with a single LED flash. I’m also uncertain if it will support external microphone. I guess not.
Qik is already experimenting with HD streaming from phones and I guess we will see Bambuser and Flixwagon do the same pretty soon.
I hope to test the new Omnia HD as soon as it arrives Norway, in the end of June.
So far I’ve found Nokia to be the best producer of phones for mobile journalist. With the specs from Samsung, I believe Nokia will find themselves in trouble. The mobile phone maker LG are also expected to deliver interesting phones the next year. The next big phone from Nokia is the Nokia N97. It delivers wide-screen format, but not HD. Basically Nokia has just taken an ordinary 4×3 sensor and chopped away some of picture. This produces wide-screen, but the picture quality will be reduced. I’m amazed that Nokia isn’t more innovative in this field. To be fair – they have announced new phones with bigger picture sensor. I agree that the megapixel count is stupid. Lens quality is far more important.
You can check out a brief review of the Samsung Omnia HD at A Bugged Life.
Pushing viral video
Mar 4th
In the third part of my social media tutorial, viral spreading of video is the name of the game. We’ll start by looking at how live mobile streaming from Qik can spread like a viral infection all through the net.
Better streaming from Bambuser?
Feb 24th
Well, that remains to be proven, but Bambuser has released a new client software for phones using Symbian 60 and UIQ. The new version is supposed to be better on latency. If the flow of data from your data carrier ain’t coping with the flow of data from the video you’re streaming, the client will still drop frames, but after your done steaming, it will upload missing frames of video and audio to the server. In theory, your on demand clips should have better quality than your clips. The QIK client has featured this function for some time. Bambuser’s upgrade is therefore long time overdue.
Join my Worldcast!
Jan 30th
Exciting news! I’m recruiting journalist for a world wide experiment with Qik and Mogulus. I want to make a live streaming event with video from all the corners of the world. To participate you will need a mobile phone supported by Qik, speak English and be a journalist. I already have members from Norway, Denmark and Australia. I would love some members from Africa, Asia and America. For this first event, I have to keep the number of team members limited to eight.
On a given time and date, the plan is to produce a live streaming event, using only mobile phones to cover a topic about MOJOs. We will be jumping live from country to country, using only a team of two producers on Mogulus. The experiment will take up to one hour of your day.
If you don’t know how to use Mogulus, don’t worry, you don’t have to. If you can start your QIK-stream, that will be enough. I will send out all the instruction you need in advance, and we will make a test before we go live from all the world. All team members will get an in depth report of the setup and result of the experiment.
If you want to join our experiment, please leave a message in the comment field and I will contact you on mail. On the ABOUT page you can also contact me directly. Or you can join this group on Facebook.
Mogulus launched PRO features
Dec 4th
It had to happen. Mogulus finally launched a PRO option. They will still keep their free service, but in two weeks they will force ads on free channels. For PRO users, some of the news will be HD Quality (1.7 mbps), 16:9, White Label and tools for analytics. For one PRO channel with 25 GB storage and bandwidth, Mogulus will charge 350 dollars. I guess their pricing on bandwidth will be the key factor for success or not.
For a lot of producers, this should be an attractive offer. Being able to design their own player, using their own ad-systems and mixing different types of streams in an easy production environment sounds like an attractive package. I guess that Quality Of Service (QOS) suddenly will be one of the most important service issues for Mogulus. In a free service, you will have to expect a lower quality. When you buy a service, you can demand quality. Leave a comment if you buy the PRO service and tell us what you think.
Streaming Media conference
Oct 9th
Recent Comments