Qik.com: Stream live video from your phone…(how this could be useful)…(or not.)

Since I’ve had my iPhone 3G I’ve looked through a lot of Apps at the ‘App Store.’

In my opinion, some of the best apps are only available to ‘jailbroken’ iPhones, iPhones that have been unlocked to allow unauthorized third party apps to be installed on the wonder-phone.

Taking advantage of an open platform for development (albeit unauthorized) is a small start up called Qik.

Qik’s App for the iPhone allows you to stream live video from your phone to Qik’s website. Qik code can be cut and pasted into social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, allowing you to share your streaming video with your friends.

OK.

Now that you have basic understanding of what it is, here are my gripes. And I haven’t even used it yet.

Gripe #1: The streaming content examples on Qik’s website are utterly boring/senseless. Imagine someone streaming a very mundane 30 second snippet of their life to the whole world via an extremely compressed video stream. No editing, no second takes. All live all the time. Imagine a live web cam WITHOUT the stripper. Or whatever.

Gripe #2: See above.

Gripe #3: This will seriously clog up precious bandwidth over ATT’s data provider for those with Qik enabled smart-phones. I won’t be able to check my email as quickly or surf the net because some dunce is streaming video of his friend waving at the camera and talking unintelligibly in a bar. ATT and Apple never approved an App such as this for this reason. It makes sense to me.

Now here are two reasons I can see Qik being useful:

Idea #1: Live blogging just got a bit more interesting. Think about it. You are now a really crappy live news broadcaster, typing into your iPhone or laptop, while sending video snippets of what’s happening *LIVE*

Idea #2: Live broadcasting by reporters for established media companies with very little capital investment. Of course the giant media companies will never understand this or take any action that would put them in some kind of relevant position in todays media ecology. That would be crazy. Let the media Titanic continue to sink, thank you very much.

So there you have it.

In the end though, I see that this will probably provide only two things:

More mundane crap that maybe one person will ever watch.

And live porn adult shows of course. The adult industry will be quickest to monetize this feature.

-Kirk

Jumpcut.com: Stream your media….and your friend’s media

Jumpcut.com is quite an interesting concept: edit, remix and publish your short film without having to buy editing software…or a computer for that matter.

I had looked into Jumpcut last quarter as part of a brainstorm I had that people could now shoot, edit and publish short films at almost zero cost. By using a cell phone or cheap point and shoot digital camera, a person could record video, upload to Jumpcut, and then edit and publish using Jumpcut’s film editing cloud application.

Gone would be the day that a person needed a film crew, a big budget, and lots of assistants to create a successful film.

Looking again at Jumpcut, I am perplexed at how they can manage online film editing AND allow editors to grab other people’s clips, and use those within their own movie.

In this share and share alike film editing network, I wondered how a system could be setup to link this all together while providing a smooth viewing experience. It is quite alot to ask a server to stream a complete movie file….it’s entirely another thing to have a server stream the same movie, but have it made up of multiple video clips form different authors, rendered in real time with special effects and basic film grading.

So far my personal experience with Jumpcut has been a mixed bag. On one hand the interface is simple and quite powerful, on the other the streaming can be quite unreliable depending on the time of day that I try to use Jumpcut.

As bandwidth and server power/storage continue to improve, I imagine that even complex tasks like film editing will take place in the cloud.

-Kirk

Examining Streaming Media: Hulu.com

Well, I have seen some really BAD examples of streaming media and some that were fair. But I have to tip my hat to Hulu.com for providing a service so slickly packaged and entertaining, that it may soon replace TV (in my house at least.)

How Hulu.com streams such high quality media is beyond me.

I will take a guess that Hulu.com is using something similar to the system used by ABC used to broadcast it’s most popular shows like Lost, where video is delivered according to your bandwidth.

I may even speculate that Hulu.com uses some kind of broad P2P grid to distribute content efficiently.

By this I mean that they may spread the broadband load out over a peer-to-peer network, so that anyone who is watching ‘Firefly’ for example, is actually a server for others who wish to watch the same show, sending out small data packets in addition to the packets coming directly from Hulu.com.

Hulu.com gets it’s revenue form commercials which are situated within the content and which I assume are specifically targeted to the user. As new clients come and go, it is a relatively simple thing to slip advertising in or out of the content presented on Hulu.com

Genius!

And the clincher for Hulu.com is that it actually provides compelling popular content (Battlestar Galactica, Arrested Development) as well as ‘long-tail’ content that must have been relatively cheap to license (Alf, A-Team, Highlander.)

This is all speculation however and hopefully by the end of my Streaming Media course at the University of Washington I will understand the platform that Hulu.com runs on.

What I know for sure though is that Hulu.com has a bright future and offers a commercially viable alternative to both TV AND YouTube.

-Kirk

Hulu.com, will you free me from Comcast?