Welcome to what could be my most amazing post ever. In this post I will be going into everything (I can think of) to do with Qik on the iPhone. I am an official alpha tester for the Qik iPhone application, so I am in a great postion to provide some key information about the service. Please not that I do not work for Qik and therefore this is not a marketing ploy of any sorts.
What is Qik?
Qik (pronounced ‘quick’) is a mobile/cell phone video streaming service. You can deliver live video to Qik with about a 3 second delay between pressing record and it appearing on the site. It isn’t recorded fully on your phone and uploaded, it is actually live video. The following illustration is from Qik’s about page.
Qik iPhone introduction
Qik currently supports a large number of Nokia devices and a few Windows Mobile devices too. But the latest area the Qik developers are working towards in a full iPhone application. Because the operating system of the iPhone is nothing like Windows Mobile or Symbian. This means they have to almost start from scratch with the iPhone. The main problem of this is the hardware. The iPhone has a camera built in but does not have a video recorder. The camera is not built to be a 30 frames per second camcorder, so there has to be a video capturing/encoding engine built from scratch too. The video has to be made into the same format that the other devices use.
Alpha testing
So the whole application is starting from scratch. Consequently they need to build the application, alpha test, make changes, beta test, make changes and then release it to the world. At the moment the application is at the alpha testing stage. I have been given the pleasure of helping Qik test the application on the iPhone and return feedback about bugs and problems I support. This also means that you need to be specifically invited to help test. There isn’t a list to sign up to or anything like that, you are head hunted.
This means that this post carries a warning that the application is still in early stages of development and therefore subject to change. I will update this post with new updates the the application as they are released to me.
App Store
There have been concerns in the blogosphere that Apple would stop Qik from having an app put into the App Store. To me these are rumours and we shall see if Apple stop Qik from publishing the application. At the moment you need a Jailbroken iPhone to run the application and the iPhone Dev Team are days away from releasing a jailbreak and unlock for the 2.0 iPhone software for the first generation and second generation devices, so if they can’t put it in the App Store they can just put it in Installer.app instead. As the software is in alpha testing a release date for the final version is still some way off, so I cannot give you even a rough date.
User interface
I have talked enough about the background of the application. Now onto the juicy bits! In one of my past posts I added a gallery of screenshots of the current software. I have included that gallery below. From the interface it is easy to tell that it is an iPhone application.
The app is incredibly simple to navigate through. When you launch it from the home screen you get a splash image of the Qik logo and tag line. Then you get the standby screen which has a preview of what the camera is seeing and an button to the options screen. This screen currently has one option to swap between 2 screen resolutions: 176×144 and 320×240. I have done all my videos in 320×240 as it obviously can fit more pixels into the video, but also because there doesnt seem to be a difference in frame rate between the 2 resoltuons. I expected the smaller resolution to be able to record more frames per second, but that isn’t the case. Its more to do with bandwidth then frame rate. When you press the record button you get a small bit of red text stating your frame rate, audio quality and number of second you have been recording. In addition to that there is a box at the bottom of the screen that contains and questions or comments given in the chat room, these appear live as people write them.
Check out my quick demo of me using the application on the iPhone included is some footage from Qik itself:
Qik website
The Qik website is a crucial cog in the whole process. In the normal way that the Qik website works with other mobile apps, whenever you click record if anyone is watching your channel it will switch to the Live video. You might even get on the home page! Not quite the power of Digg.com’s homepage but still good for traffic to your video.
Competitors
In terms of phone video streaming there are a number of websites that are capable of streaming from Symbian and Windows Mobile based devices. But there are only 2 that are venturing into the world of the Apple iPhone. These being Qik and Flixwagon. They both announced their support for the iPhone within 24 hours of eachother but Qik is the only one I have been able to test. Flixwagon have said that they will let me test it when the have a version that can be installed on users phones, by this I assume they are talking about installer.app. So until I have used them both I cannot give my opinion. Although I will say that Flixwagon will have have to raise the bar to beat what I have seen so far from Qik.
Conclusion
From the tone of this post you can probably guess that I am a big fan of Qik for the iPhone and I cannot wait till more features come to the alpha and then that everyone gets to experience the technology pushing technology that is ‘Live video streaming from a mobile/cell phone’.
If you have any questions at all I will answer them. Just post them in the comments below or use the contact form to send me an e-mail directly. I will be happy to answer anything you ask. I might even answer them in my next video blog.
Other coverage
Here are some links to some other coverage about Qik for the iPhone:
