Qik Livestream recorded 11 March 2010 on Nokia E90.
IT IS EASY to forget things that happen before their time and Qik's livestreaming service is one of them. We first started covering live events with Qik running on Symbian phones in 2009 and made the process part of the creative multimedia degree programme in Tipperary Institute.
But like a lot of other interesting technologies, Qik failed in the mainstream even while proving its use case. Today, people in the Mobile Journalism Conference (3MoJoCon in Ireland as a trending item) can learn from dozens of journalists who have become advocates of live streaming. And although many would say mobile livestreams have happened only because of the iPhone, the old heads in the audience can point to Qik and Bambuser as technologies that enabled mobile journalists for more than five years.
I heard about Qik's mobile video service from Pat Phelan and Jackie Danicki in 2009, two years after the company rolled out its public beta. Qik offered video hosting, video sharing and two-way video conferencing. Even with spotty over-the-air broadband, Qik allowed me to stream live video from my Nokia E90 and Nokia N86 to the internet. With the Qik app, I could immediately connect with Ovi Share, Facebook via Facebook Connect, Twitter, LiveStream, 12seconds.tv, YouTube, Blogger, Seesmic, Tumblr, WordPress, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Technorati. I could also embed my Qik videos on my blog, either as live content or pre-recorded videos.
When Qik sold to Skype, most of my Qik videos were uploaded to YouTube where they lost their counters. On YouTube, only a dozen views have been documented for many of my Sunday News Qik Reports that had more than 100 views each.
Today, I prefer using Google Hangouts on Air for HD live streaming because of the ease of setting up calendar events with the Hangouts featured in the events. HOAs automatically roll into my YouTube channel after they happen, meaning people can rewind the event long after the lights have gone out.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches Creative Multimedia on the LIT-Clonmel campus.]
