Qik - Mobile Video Experiment By Zennie Abraham

For the last two weeks or so, this blogger has been experimenting with Zennie62 on Qik Mobile Video. The idea of Qik Mobile Video is to allow you to upload a video using your smart phone, right on the spot from where you are. It's not quite a live stream - like USTREAM.tv - but so close in terms of delay time that it's a somewhat credible substitute.

Using a Samsung Variant Galaxy smartphone, five videos have been produced for the Zennie62 brand thus far. Where it fits in the Zennie62 strategy is that it allows us to show you what's happening as it is happening. Here's an example: the T-Mobile store video that was transferred to YouTube.com:



As you can see, it's grainy.  That's the rub.  The pixels are so large it makes Qik less than desirable for constant video blogging.  Videos have been unloaded from the Samsung phone directly to YouTube, and the quality has been at "high-def" level.  But not so for the Qik videos.

The problem is that some of the YouTube-direct files are too large to be quickly uploaded from the smartphone.  The bandwidth "pipe" doesn't seem to be large enough to fit a video longer than, say, 12 seconds.

If that can be solved, either by a better smartphone video upload system - or a switch to the iPhone, which seems to do this better from looking at Renetto's videos - or a better signal pickup from YouTube, then the dream of true mobile video-blogging is a step closer to reality.  

If you have any tips or suggestions, please provide them.  Thanks.