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