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Mobile streaming video: Is the war over? Has QIK won?

Published by Ewan on Monday 21st July 2008, 21:15 | Filed under: Mobile

I’m wondering if the war is over. I’m looking through the QIK features and the ease of use… has QIK won the mobile 2.0 streaming video war?

Or is there more to come?

You can, by the way, get yourself a QIK account really easily now. They’ve lifted the beta registration restrictions as of today. Fly over to www.qik.com and you’ll be setup right-away.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Ewan...

    There is definately MORE to come...

    WATCH THIS SPACE....

    ;)
  • Nope.

    Qik drains the battery like it expects you to be tethered to the wall.
    The mobile friendly site barely works - loads of broken images and links.
    The server isn't quick enough to live stream at high quality (I know it's not my connection)
    The website is a UI disaster.
    The videos take ages to load and stutter all the way through.
    Commenting is nice, but when you've got a 3 minute buffer - it's worse than useless.
    I can't place a 3G video call to them. Why bother with a rubbish application which only works on a handful of devices when every 3G device* has video call functionality?

    I do use it occasionally, but it really is sub-par.

    .....and breathe....
    *Apart from Mr Jobs' plastic toy
  • Mike42
    I'm with Terence. I really wanted to like it, for it to work, for it to become a part of my everyday life.

    But nope. On the best device, perfect 3.5G coverage, and it was still utterly sub-par.

    Answer for the masses: Shoot natively on N-Series, then uploaded with one click to Flickr using SOL3 or ShoZu.

    Although the upload limitations on most networks make the experience so slow that no-one will do it in numbers that matter.

    And 3GPP videocalling to some sort of gateway is utterly hopeless, sorry Terence. The resolution is so utterly dismal that it makes YouTube look like 1080p. BedroomTV / SpringDoo utterly failed to capture the public imagination with this sort of service. It only technically worked when uploading high-quality video, not as a stream.

    Bottom line is that YouTube sets the lowest bar in terms of quality, and mobile networks/handsets are 5 years away from being able to deliver that quality, real-time/streaming, to the masses.

    For the foreseeable future, sharing video from mobile devices means Flip all.

    £0.02, but you can't argue with the laws of physics.

    /m
  • South77
    Video uses too much battery. Sending it across the network makes things worse.

    The mass-market can’t live with the anxiety that they might run out of juice before they get home.

    Imagine you can’t take a call from your kid’s school, boss, or client because you’ve been using qwik, mobitubia, etc.
  • Highly agree - although 176*144 is good enough for what most people are using Qik for; talking heads.
  • Mike42
    *cough* IMHO, nope.

    144? you must be joking. People don't get out of bed these days for less than QVGA.
  • Of course, bigger is always better. But for mobile to mobile, I think it's suitable. It's not terrible for fairly static content.
    <object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZR4REs9pGyU"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZR4REs9pGyU" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>
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