Since late December I've been using Qik (pronounced quick) - a new mobile phone application that allows users to stream live video from their phones and all I can say is 'wow'. It's in alpha now and I've been fortunate enough to be one of the early testers. Qik is so easy to use and knowing that all I need to do to share live video is to press a few buttons and presto - it's live. You can think of it as a cross between YouTube and Twitter, at least that's how I've been describing it to people when I show them.

Examples
Here's a video I shot with my phone back in December while cycling across the golden gate bridge using the low quality setting and an EDGE network connection on at&t:



And here's a clip from Barcelona I recorded on Monday using the high quality setting using a 3G network in Europe:


Supported devices
Qik currently runs on Nokia S60 3rd edition or later devices and I have it running on my N95 8GB. Other devices include: N71, N73, N75, N76, N77, N80, N91, N92, N93i, N95, E50, E51, E61i, E65, E70m E90 Communicator, 3250, 5500, 5700 Xpress Music, 6110 Navigator, 6120 Classic, 6121 Classic, and 6290. Several new Nokia S60 devices were announced this week here at Mobile World Congress and I'm sure they will be able to support it as well. You can get more information about the features of Qik on their FAQ page.


FLV is your friend
You record/broadcast a live video stream from your phone and on the back end your video stream is converted to FLV and is viewable on the Qik.com web site. Once a user has an account on the Qik site then you can go into your profile page and get the URL for your recorded videos and then use then as you wish. If you're a Flash developer then you know what you can do with FLV... lots of cool things.

Features
Now granted depending on the speed of the network will depend on how "live" the video stream is. I've been testing various network connection speeds and can say even with and EDGE connection and quality set to low it will stream from my handset.

The Qik app has two settings for the quality of the streamed video: "optimize for" and "quality". Optimize for has two options: max quality and min delay. Since what I'm streaming isn't meant to be a live broadcast I keep this setting to max quality. For the quality setting there are three options: low, normal and high and have the corresponding recording resolutions (176x144, 320x240 and 640x480). If I'm connected via WiFi or 3G then I select the high setting, otherwise I'll select medium. Additional features include muting the audio and specifying the privacy to either public or private. One thing to note is if your video stream is more than the available bandwidth, Qik will buffer the stream and then send the bits out once there's bandwidth available.

Now see this
Given this new ability to instantly share what I'm seeing and hearing with others, I've added a video playback window in the upper right of my blog. This window will show the most recent video upload to Qik from my phone. Sometimes I'll be recording things that are work related and other times not. The point is I can now easily share my experiences with the rest of the world - thanks to Qik and I think that's cool.