qik making serious advances
Things are moving rapidly for my friends at QIK.
I am hearing all sorts of rumours including some serious progress on the business side.
qik are midway through a huge set of upgrades and the platform stability is now really quite amazing.
With a cool new website and a number of innovative upgrades I think the battle for mobile broadcasting is well and truly over.
There is a new Symbian client 0.08.70 that further raises the bar on live recording, make sure you download the new version, its on the left hand side on the homepage once you login.
You can now create groups and finally and most importantly users can now create their own events, this one is going to be huge for events and I am sure it will be excellent for the Open Coffee BBQ.
One of my favourite items on qik is Bernie Goldbach’s Sunday newspaper review and I think more items like this would cause me to view it even more.
I love Qik…what can I say…
A good product, solid team, working like a charm!
I’d love to see the videos made available in MPEG format so that I could consume them on an iPod or similar player (how many portable devices aside from phones support 3gp, I wonder?)
Really good post Pat.
I really like Quicktime encoder but I can see the benefits of Qik also
James – Today we do transcode to 3gp format that enables the video to played back on most phones (except iPhone). We are working on transcoding to a format that can be downloaded and played on portable devices like iPod.
Bhaskar – what you’ve done to date is excellent. Easy access to getting the 3GP downloaded is great (that can be easily converted on the desktop – I was watching my recent ‘unboxing’ Qik on my iPod yesterday). My interest in a format like MPEG was so that a QIK stream could then also be a podcast on devices that playback MPEGs. Either directly from QIK.com or via blog plugins which were able to treat QIK content as assets easily.
Qik is one of those great services that come along once in a while.
It has a lot of techie/business use but apart from that I use it for such things as broadcasting my kids performances and recitals live to my parents sitting room 2000 km away.
It’s uses like this that will bring Qik into the mainstream and that will really create growth. It’s great for us geeks to drool over it but that’s not where the money lies.
Now if only I could record my Qik’s in the full 5MP resolution on my N95!
Aah! Got it James.
Evert – you can actually do 640×480 video using Qik. The way to do this is start Qik and then from Menu / Settings select Quality = High. This will change the resolution to 640×480 on the N95, E90, etc. The thing to remember here is that with this video quality – the capture bitrate becomes high and if the network is not capable to handle that, you can experience a delay.
To see the difference between the Capture bitrate and Transmission bitrate as allowed by the network Press # while streaming.