Qik takes cellphone video streaming service to public beta - iPhone Qik application

[Ɔkyeame Kwame]

Qik takes cellphone video streaming service to public beta - iPhone Qik application still coming

Posted by Will on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 6:33 pm under iPhone, Mac OS, Windows Mobile, Services, Symbian, Applications, Announcements

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.