Video lifestreaming has made great strides in the past year as Justin Kan strapped a camera on his head. Robert Scoble, Sarah Meyers, Justine Ezarik and a number of others including myself have participated in one way or another in the lifestreaming video movement leveraging tools like UStream.TV, Mogulus, Justin.TV and Blog.TV.
With CES taking place in Las Vegas this week and the unfortunate fact that I am unable to attend I am going to take full advantage of my friends lifestreaming videos to get a feel of the conference. Qik is an alpha product that has sprung onto the scene to enable users to stream live video directly from their mobile phone making the barriers of entry into lifestreaming a step closer to the everyday mobile phone user.
Currently operating on a number of Nokia and Qik enables you to stream videos directly from your phone to the Web. You can post directly to a blog, Twitter or Facebook. Every video you record via Qik is automatically captured online and thus can then be used in other websites.
Qik is still very much in the alpha phase as I did experience frame freeze-ups, poor picture and audio quality but I expect these types of issues to be worked out with time. Also if you are an Apple iPhone owner you are out of luck because the iPhone oes not include a video recorder. I fall into this category so I am unable to give Qik a try. But some of my friends have as I have been following Robert Scoble as he bumps into my friend Sarah Meyers at CES registration (shown below). I also noticed some other familiar Qik alpha users covering CES like my old friends from Technology Evangelist.
Bottom-line: Qik enables users to lifestream from a mobile phone lowering the barriers for anyone looking to stream live video onto the Web.
