For all you cellphone videographers looking to broadcast your oh-so-important daily lives’ activities to the ether with that handy-dandy video camera you call a smartphone, Qik has finally announced their highly anticipated public beta.
What, you didn’t realize that smartphone of yours was a full-fledged wireless video camera capable of streaming live video to the web for all to see? Well, Qik will have you thinking otherwise with their almost real-time video streaming service.
The new public beta now offers compatibility with handsets like the Samsung Blackjack-II, Motorola Q, Samsung SHG-i600, and the Nokia N78. And, the beta service now offering Sprint and Verizon customers the same cellular video streaming capability that was previously only available to AT&T customers that managed to get in on the private beta program. Over 30 Windows Mobile and Symbian S60-powered handsets are supported now (find the full list here).
Also new to the Qik public beta service are the ability to broadcast your videos in to pre-defined groups. The groups can be individually set to public, private, or restricted. And, with video streaming latency times pared down to the sub-second to 3-second range, Qik is easily the most “real-time” live video streaming service in the industry.
Most importantly, Qik is still working to bring a native version of their application to the Apple iPhone. Regardless of whether or not Apple has seen fit to give the iPhone or iPhone 3G any video recording capabilities, Qik is pushing hard to get their iPhone application out the door. But, it’ll be up to Apple’s higher-ups to allow or deny the application from being offered through the AppStore. Qik’s iPhone application is set to kick of alpha-stage testing next week.
Of course, the iPhone 3G and updated iPhones running iPhone 2.0 OS are already jailbroken and working with freely available third-party applications, so we could see Qik circumventing any Apple-bans with an application available for jailbroken iPhones.
Sign up for Qik here.
Keep reading for a full rundown of Qik’s new features.
Key New Features:
– Groups: You can now create groups / micro-communities that they can then stream to. Details here.
– Events: Create your own events – from small family events to large corporate events – and invite others to join those events. Details here.
– New Player: A better looking player that contains the ability to (a) view the thumbnails of all the videos of the user and play directly from there (b) chat from within the player that shows up as overlay on the player.
– Reduced Latency: Our guys did some more magic over the July 4th weekend and now we have now got the latency down to 1/2 to 3 second. Details here.
– Playback on phones using resident media RSS readers:You can now subscribe to Qiks from your favorite RSS reader on your phone or the Nokia Podcasting application on your Nokia smartphone. Then subscribe to your favorite Qikkers and get their feeds directly to the phone and play the videos directly from the these readers.
– Signup from mobile device:You can now sign up even from your mobile phone. Just go to qik.com from the browser on your phone and follow the instructions on next steps.
New Distribution Partners:
– Go live on Facebook: Go live on your Facebook profile and enable people to chat with you directly from there. The Facebook application can be found here.
– Go live on Myspace: To go live on Myspace, just cut/paste your channel embed code and you can go live on Myspace.
– Go live on Orkut: Cut/paste your channel embed code to your scrapbook on Orkut to go live on Orkut.
– Develop your own integrations:We also have some partners integrating Qik into their application using oEmbed and Media RSS from the Qik homepage and the profile pages. Example of recent integrations – (a) CoverItLive: the live blogging service now has live video blogging with Qik. Details here. (b) iPoki: A location based service now shows location of Qiks and Qikkers. Details here.