Live video streaming from mobile phone: Now possible with Qik.com

Ever wanted to cover an event or a prank using your mobile phone as it unfolded before your eyes and share it with people, LIVE?

Qik answers your wishes with a service to stream near-live audio-video content online. The model itself is based somewhat around the twitter concept of following people. The video content is laid out like you would expect it to be: “hot posts”, “top qik’ers” and tag based sorting. It lends itself very well to the web 2.0 ideology of user generated content, inter-connectivity with other services such as facebook, youtube and stumbleupon and adds the real-time bit to it. The most important aspect of the service is that you no longer have to wait to transfer videos onto the PC and then upload. Qik records it for you as soon as you hit the record button on the phone app. Whats even more impressive is their range of supported handset manufacturers (see image below).

Qik.com caters to a number of handset manufacturers

Moreover, it gives you plenty of choices regarding how you want to acquire the software for the phone. I’ve already put up the most amateur video ever, here (yeah laugh all you want). The service opens the doors to citizen-video-journalism with live coverage of events worldwide. I’m looking forward to seeing some cool n Qik mashups.

Youtube gets pricey!

The advertisements on the sidebars have been there since soon after Google took over YouTube. After months of contemplating a way to monetize the service Google has started showing some content sensitive ads in the video window. Two scenarios that come to mind: users may be put off seeing the ads in the middle of the video viewport and could potentially seek other emerging Web2.0 (the concept not just design) based services like Vimeo. Second, what could be better than getting ads based on your product research, afterall it only gives you more leads.

What is of import here is whether this is only an experimental ad delivery method. News websites monetize their video services through ads served before and in-between news clips. Fortunately Google has been considerate about our bandwidths by not forcing data downloads.

An alternative revenue model could be charging major ISP’s commisions based on volume usage. However, this would require a substantive buy-in from ISP’s and could possible lead to the service’s demise. To circumvent change issues another approach could be to charge the users a premium for removing ads from their videos. This could work for those users who run “subscription based channels”. Commercial users could also be charged a premium to remove competitor ads from from their video pages altogether. Tactics like these could very well create a win-win situation for both Google and YouTube users.