Larry Kless' Weblog: August 2008

Friday, August 29, 2008

McCain's VP Pick Sarah Palin on Flixwagon

Now as the Democratic ticket hits the campaign trail following their successful lovefest in Denver, the political stage is set for the next media event with the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. The big story today of course is John McCain's selection of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. Traditional broadcast and new media outlets spread the news through the distributed channels. This Tweet caught my eye from Flixwagon that said,"flixwagon rare early interview with veep candidate Sarah Palin about the elections via MTV and Flixwagon: http://is.gd/236u"

I followed the link to this Flixwagon interview with the Alaskan Governor conducted last February on Super Tuesday by MTV News Street Teamer Dani Carlson.

Here's an excerpt from that post by Ken Zamkow on Flixwagon blog:

"With Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain's surprising announcement of picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, many media outlets are finding there aren't many videos quite yet showing the veep hopeful talking about the national elections. Not MTV: back in Super Tuesday in February 2008, MTV street reporter Dani Carlson made a live video interview with Palin using a mobile phone running the Flixwagon application."

From the MTV Newsroom by Jocelyn Vena, with reporting by Dani Carlson, Sarah Palin, Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee, Plugs Romney, Paul — But Not McCain — In MTV Interview Published by MTV News on Friday, August 29, 2008:

"In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I." (more)
"She also spoke about Alaska’s natural resources, and urged the next president to look to her state for relief from the country’s reliance on foreign oil. “We have so much oil we are just sitting on,” she said. “We would be less reliant on foreign sources of energy [if we utilized that] — we need to have the ability to tap into it and produce for rest of the United States.”

Related and Interesting:

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Social Media and Video at the DNC 08 with Seesmic, ooVoo, Qik, Kyte, Flixwagon (Plus Ralph Nader and Citizen Kate!)

Social media applications have changed the way we experience current events creating new distribution networks that circumvent the corporate owned media networks. The DNC 08 is a great example of how people are connecting, communicating, sharing, reporting and changing the world using real-time and instant video messaging. In 2004 blogging gained influence in the political process but now in 2008 it's completely different with Twitter, Qik, Flixwagon, Seesmic, ooVoo , UStream, Stickam and so many other live and on demand video services. These new communication tools are much more powerful and direct and enable us to broadcast our feeds across the globe instantaneously. Who knows what it will be like in 2012? Chris Albrecht posted The Ultimate Web Video Guide to the Democratic Convention on NewTeeVee and here are a few examples of the "New Media Press" that I saw today.

Seesmic has a created Public Conventions account giving people access to post their messages from and to the conventions. From the Seesmic blog, "... Dan Patterson and the crew from TalkRadioNews are rocking the DNC.Also continue to participate in the video conversation at LinkTV powered by Seesmic. Below is the latest update from Dan in a long thread that has been the center of conversation. Please check it out, but also be warned, there is some harsh language.

Eileen Smith from the Texas Monthly, who I met earlier this month for the My ooVoo Day With.. Political Edition, is using ooVoo for exclusive videos and round table discussions. She and Paul Burka will be "Crashing the Conventions" and recording daily reports from both Denver and Minneapolis at the two major party conventions. Videos are available at Texas Monthly: Multimedia.

The Uptake is a small using Qik and captured the Ralph Nader News Conference. This may be one of the only venues you'll actually be able to hear from this staunch 3rd party candidate. At the end of the clip there's a fun exchange between Ralph and Citizen Kate.

Citizen Kate featured again in another The Uptake Qik video covering the political events the one hug at a time.

The Huffington Post created a branded player using Kyte to post its Media Shows.

Trevor F Martin is a Think MTV Street Team Reporter using Flixwagon and caught the Tent State Music Festival today. On his blog he says, "Today at the Tent State Music Festival, Rage Against the Machine headlined a star studded line-up including the Flobots, Wayne Kramer from the MC5s, the Coup and State Radio. Check out interviews with Wayne Kramer, Andy ROK and Johnny 5 of the Flobots and Boots from the Coup at http://think.mtv.com/profile/trevorFmartin"

Qik and Flixwagon Mix it up at the DNC 08

The two popular live mobile broadcasting services, Qik and Flixwagon, are covering the events at 2008 Democratic National Convention. These mobile reporters and citizen journalists use their cell phones (which replaces the large camera crews, bulky video equipment and satellite uplink trucks) to provide an unfiltered view that you won't see on the network television broadcasts.

Qik has an event page here with 16 Qikkers attending and while the convention is only televised for a few days the Qik event one week long. I've included a few videos below.

This video which already has over 33,000 views from TPMTV is a Qik report following Hillary Clinton's speech this evening. (UPDATE: The reporter is David Kurtz and his delivery is very much in the traditional news reporting style. His other videos of interviews and on the floor coverage are already some of the "Most Viewed" videos on Qik with A look from behind the podium as Michelle Obama finishes with close to 87,000 views)

This is one is from C-SPAN of protesters, vendors, delegates outside the Denver Convention Center. About a minute into the video you can some protesters getting arrested.

Another one from the Uptake is titled "Who's Wolf Blitzer?" and features a colorful protest through the streets of Denver.

I'm always interested in behind the scenes video and this one is "Inside C-SPAN's Production Truck."

Flixwagon is also on the scene partnering again with MTV and arming a number of street reporters with Flixwagon-equipped mobile phones to cover the action in Denver. They're also streaming live videos directly to their pages on the MTV Think website as part of MTV's Choose or Lose campaign .

The official release is here.

Some of the videos and street reporters can be found here:

Sunday, August 24, 2008

New Media Expo 2008 Report: The Future is Videocasting

Known as one of the world's most popular conventions for podcasters, online video creators and bloggers, the 4th annual New Media Expo, took place in Las Vegas last weekend. In years past, the Expo was was primarily focused on audio podcasting but this year saw a rise in videocasting. Founder Tim Bourquin said that now it's 50/50 audio and video.

As Ben Parr of Mashable writes in, The Death of Podcasting and the Rise of Videocasting? No, It’s About Options, that, "We hear less about podcasts and and more about video shows such as Epic Fu, Pop17 and even TWiT live (now streamed by StickAM). The trend seems clear - podcasting is going by the wayside and videocasting is taking the helm."

Videocasters are big and with personalities like Gary Vaynerchuk leading off with the first keynote address it helped set the tone that you can be your own new media brand, and with 60,000 daily viewers of his Wine Library TV, you know Gary Vee definitely means business. He's a hero and celebrity in the videocasting and blogging community and is one the first to reach mainstream success crossing over to TV audiences with his appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Ellen Degeneres Show. His blog says, "Gary’s fame can be attributed to his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business building."

With over 2000 attendees, Tim Bourquin calls the Expo "a fantastic weekend of education and networking!" and the conference program describes it as "a hands-on, exciting, "how-to" event with practical conference sessions about how to produce high-quality online audio and video content, grow a loyal audience, and even make a few bucks with your content in creative ways."

Steven Hodson of Mashable wrote about this last month in his post, Video Blogging Is Not The Frontier You Might Expect, where he made the point that video blogging is not the same as traditional text blogging and that it's evolving into the next new territory of social media communication.

So who attends the NME? Audience demographics can be viewed here, and the graph below charts the main reasons why they attend.
Why do they attend the New Media Expo?

While I didn't attend the Expo myself I managed to view a few videos around the topic of the video blogging boon. Along with Gary Vee's keynote another favorite was an amazing live demonstration by Will it Blend.

Gary Vee was also later joined by iJustine and Walt Ribeiro for panel session on what's the direction of online video. Ben Parr moderated the live session which was streamed live on Ustream and covered topics like mobile, live mobile streaming, Nokia N95 and Qik are the catalysts, life streaming and privacy vs. meeting everyone is the world.

Gary Vee said that in the mainstream world nobody knows the Internet celebs but give it time, we are the early adopters, live video, Twitter, Friendfeed, lifestreaming - people who have content will rule! You can read Ben Parr's post here
~~or click on the photo to link to~~view the video below.

Live streaming video by Ustream
Also, David Tamés of Kino-Eye.com sat down with Steve Woolf (Epic Fu), Zadi Diaz (Epic Fu), Steve Garfield (SteveGarfield.com), and Walt Ribeiro (Ustream.TV), for a conversation which was planned to be an audio podcast as he says below but turned out as video. Recorded on Saturday, August 16, 2008 topics discussed included "what was best about the show, issues as the big-players enter the space, and Net Neutrality."

The video is 19 minutes and David Tamés shared this about producing the video,

"I had originally planned this to be an audio interview, but when Steve Garfield gave me the video he shot video with his N95, it became a video. When I combined his video and my audio, I was impressed that the audio sync drifted less that a frame from start to end. The N95 is an impressive little camera, suitable for minimalist double-system sound with a digital audio recorder as we used it here."

This video features Tim Bourquin talking about how the NME evolved and where it's going. Watch more videos here.

I read some mixed reviews from some of the attendees which I've listed below and Bourquin himself went on record saying that he may quit the Trade show business altogether. But it doesn't change the fact that many attendees and presenters alike saw video becoming more of niche player in the blogosphere.
Related:

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Flash Encoding Resources: Bit Rate Calculator and Optimal Aspect Ratios

These two Adobe resources surfaced a few weeks ago were recently highlighted on Fresh DV and other sources. ReelSEO Creator and publisher Mark Robertson, who wrote, "For those of you that are unaware, there is an excellent FLV bitrate calculator tool from Adobe that does an excellent job of helping you determine the optimal bitrate at which to encode your Flash video files."

Optimal Bitrate Calculator for Flash Video Encoding
Click on the image below or click here to go to the calculator.

FreshDV.com published a table of the optimal frame sizes to use when converting to FLV (Link via Andy Dickinson.) FreshDV's Matthew Jeppsen wrote, "Encoding gurus have long known that to get optimal results from a codec it is best to choose a frame size that divisible by at least 4 or 8. This is because codecs often use use 4×4, 8×8 and sometimes 16×16 “blocks” to form an image. If your image dimensions are evenly divisible, no extra blocks are wasted and the codec can be most efficient with respect to image quality. In the case of On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark codecs, both use 16×16 blocks."

Optimal Frame Dimensions for Flash Video Encoding
Regarding the table below Reel SEO's Robertson added, "For the best image quality and playback, you should always use width and height dimensions that use a multiple of 4 (good), 8 (better), or 16 (best). The following table from Adobe provides guidance as to the best frame dimensions (both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios) for FLV encoded files."

Flash expert Robert Reinhardt who created both the Bit rate caculator and table emphasized,
"In fact, I would recommend that you refrain from using 4 or 8 multiples unless absolutely necessary, unless you can verify with cross-platform tests that quality or playback haven't been compromised."

These tables complement the Flash video bitrate calculator by Robert Reinhardt.

Related:

Friday, August 22, 2008

Nokia N95 Test: Comparing Qik and N95 Video Quality

It's been two weeks since I returned the Nokia 95 to Nokia/WOM World which had been on loan as a demo trial device. I had a month to test it out and out it through it's paces. Nokia/ WOM World offers trial devices to social media users interested in participating in their trial program. The N95 8GB North American version is like the regular N95 8GB with a 5MP Carl Zeiss lens camera with auto-focus, video recording and many other features. My mobile carrier is ATT so it was easy for me to drop in my SIM card and upgrade my current plan to unlimited data to test out the applications I was really interested in, which were live mobile streaming.

My overall impression is that the N95 is a great device for video and photos and applications like Qik, Flixwagon, Kyte and Livecastr, which were ones I tested. The install and set up for each application was easy. However, the browser was a little archaic and without a QWERTY keyboard made seemingly simple feats like typing a real challenge (and a pain.) While I tried all four of the live mobile streaming applications I have to say that Qik is my favorite and it's the focus this post on comparing the quality of the Qik to the N95 video recording.

For the test my friend Rich recorded two clips of me in a studio setting with professional lighting and proper acoustics. One video was streamed live to the Qik web site (which was later archived) and the other was recorded straight onto the N95 (and not streamed live.) Both videos were recorded at the highest settings available on the N95 and Qik (640x480, high quality, highest FPS (frames per second). What's unclear in this test is the encoding mode (1 or 2-pass VBR, CBR), keyframe placement, filter settings (contrast, brightness, gamma) and how they're encoded (as MPEG-4 Part 2 or H.263 or MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC/H.264) and I admit this is not an apples to apples comparison since the two videos were compressed at different bit rates and audio frequencies.

3gp profile
Video codec: Apple MPEG4 Decompressor, 640 x 480, Millions
AMR Narrowband, Mono, 8.000 kHz
Frames per second: 14.88 FPS (average)
Data rate: 516.57 kbits/s

In the Studio from Larry Kless on Vimeo.

mp4 profile
Video codec: Apple MPEG4 Decompressor, 640 x 480, Millions
Audio: AAC, Mono, 48.000 kHz
Frames per second: 29.22 FPS (average)
Data rate: 2056.22 kbits/s

There's a noticeable difference in detail in the Qik .3gp and the N95 .mp4 videos. The 3gp has more compression rendering less detail compared to the mp4. Compression rates also affect the audio quality. You can also really hear the difference between the 8 kHz narrowband compression of the 3gp to the 48 kHz ACC compression of the mp4. I think the n95 microphone does do a good job picking up sound even though it faces away from your shooting subject and it is possible to insert an external microphone.

The real time playback (temporal quality) of both videos holds up and there's not much motion artifacting but there's visible blockiness, fuzzyiness and noise. While there's a fair amount of color accuracy with both, neither video could actually capture the detail in the herringbone pattern of my jacket which is actually not something you should wear for video. I also should have taken a tip from myself since I always tell clients with jackets to wear a solid color (no busy patterns), fix their shirt collars, pull on their coat tails and sit on them to smooth out the shoulder line. I probably should have applied some make up too to cut out some of the shine. I'll keep those tips in mind for next time. ;-)

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong Demos Qik in Live National TV Broadcast

Social media is gaining wider acceptance and stories of high profile adopters continue to make the news. You may have heard of the Qikking Congressman John Culberson from Texas who uses both Qik and Twitter to update his constituents and followers with an unfiltered view from inside the beltway. This is interesting story that comes from Singapore by way of the Qik blog where a few days ago Bhaskar Roy wrote,

"On 17 August at 7pm Singapore Time (4am PST, 7am EST), the Prime Minister of Singapore, LEE Hsien Loong, will be using Qik and streaming video live from his cell phone that will be broadcasted straight to television. This can be watched live on qik.com/ndr2008 and qik.com/ndr_2008."

Audrey Tan followed up on the Qik blog today saying,

"The Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong in the National Day Rally 2008 was seen in action showcasing Qik to an enthralled audience... Rather than an ordinary National Day Rally, the Prime Minister of Singapore called this the Multi-Media Super Show. During this rally, the Prime Minister talked about engagement with citizens and pushing for participation through mediums like Qik."

The Straits Times, Singapore's most widely read newspaper, reported the Prime Minister's Qik demo,

"MIDWAY through his National Day Rally address, the Prime Minister fished out a mobile phone and proceeded to film the audience before him in the auditorium. Behind him, on a giant screen, the audience saw themselves featured on the web page of the Prime Minister's Office - live.

'There you are, simple as that. I've just made our first non-political video,' he said to laughter from the audience."

Politics in Singapore have been controlled by the People's Action Party (PAP) which has been known to be a more repressive political culture consistently rejecting liberal democratic values. Lee Hsien Loong statements seemed more democratic by making the point that with this new technology anyone can become a filmmaker and share their news and information with the world. He continued, 'So, we've got to allow political videos but with some safeguards... An outright ban is no longer sensible... This is how people communicate on the Web in daily life. They make videos, they pass clips around.'
Political films in Singapore were banned 10 years due to their emotive qualities that could stir people's visceral emotions and incite irrational behavior. But as the Straits Times reports, "The promise of some political films being allowed was cheered by film-maker Martyn See, who had two of his films banned in recent years.

'This is by far the most obvious relaxation of political space in Singapore in the past 20 years. It will lessen the climate of fear,' he said.

YouTube video description: As part of explaining how his government is opening up to the social web, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong demonstrates Qik on a Nokia n95 to his National Day Rally audience. For the related links, see http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=2299

Bhaskar Roy said this came about through a Facebook connection that he made with Alvin Lai, a student from National University Singapore (NUS), who was studying at Stanford as a part of the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) s. He and Alvin later met and Alvin joined as an extended member of the Qik team. Bhaskar added that, "Who would have ever thought a chance meeting through Facebook would lead to something like this."

It's the power of social media at work.

Related

Monday, August 18, 2008

Master New Media: Best Live Video Streaming Services Compared - Sharewood Guide, Review of 13 Applications

Nico Canali De Rossi and Robin Good published a new guide for Master New Media yesterday titled, "Best Live Video Streaming Services Compared - Sharewood Guide", which looks at the some of latest live streaming services that are available to online video publishers, lifecasters and anyone who wants to stream live video. You can read the full article here as this post is just an excerpt of their detailed guide.

The features they covered include: Multimedia/Playlist integration, Text chat, Co-hosting-Multiple web cameras and recording. Included in the guide is the table below that compares the features of the following live video streaming services. I've used a number of these platforms but there are several I'm hearing about for the first time.

Live Video Streaming Services - Comparison Table

go to the table!
You can read more about each of these services in the full guide which also has links to other Master New Media related articles. A few people have commented on this article with corrections to this table, such as, UStream does have a co-host feature and that Stickam can record live streams. Another newcomer to the live video streaming service CSLive.tv LiveStreaming by Coolstreaming whichis currently is Beta.

Related Klessblog posts:

Sunday, August 17, 2008

I'm Having a Louis Gray Moment

While recently checking my feeds in Feedburner I was pleased to see that I hit a new high of subscribers on this blog. While the business world is driven by metrics and data analysis to achieve the best outcomes my process is more organic. Over the last year, as I've explored social media and blogging, I've found a niche that's evolved through my interests and area of focus. I launched another blog that I try to maintain which has a single focus, called online video publishing, but issues with it's blog platform tools and time often drive me back to this blog. My attention is divided is so many directions that I don't usually keep track of how many people are subscribed, read it, link to it or it's reach. Lately though I've been looking at the data as my social networks expand and thought I would take a moment to share a blog milestone, or if you will, a Louis Gray moment.

While it may seem inconsequential to some, I've grown my readers and reached 100 subscribers on this blog not through any sort of aggressive marketing plan, but through an active participation in the online communities of Friendfeed, Twitter, Seesmic, MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, ooVoo, Qik, etc. where I've exchanged conversations and shared comments, ideas, opinions and specifically my own unique channel of information. I love seeing new and familiar faces appear on my blog in the MyBlogLog widget, tracking people's Twitter updates and the discussions and sharing in Friendfeed. Unlike Chris Brogan I have to sleep so end up with a lot of draft posts of which many don't get published. But that's okay, because right now I'm in it for the fun and I'll draft a business plan later.

Thank you all for participating in this blog and being a part of my community. Also, thanks to Louis Gray for the inspiration of this post. As an early adopter of Friendfeed and one it's most vocal advocates he's helped see it's real value. This post was meant to celebrate his self-referential style of analysis and how a single blogger fits into the bigger picture. He may not know it but I'm an A's fan too.

A little more about me... I've been an artist, musician and have collected comic books ever since I was a kid (mostly Marvel), I've been a film and video maker since college, a video communications professional most of my adult life and a blogger for less than a year. But of all the things I've done I'm hooked on blogging the most.

Related:

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Citizen Journalist Uses Qik to Capture "Free Tibet" Protest in China and Gets Deported

This story was covered in a number blogs a few days ago about New York video blogger and citizen journalist Noel “Noneck” Hidalgo who, along with a group of journalists, was rounded up and deported from China last week for documenting a “Free Tibet” protest in Tienanmen square. Noneck who has used video and photos to document his world travels on his blog used Qik to stream live mobile broadcasts from China and says in his video description,"I happen to have stumbled upon a set of protesters in Tiananmen Square." The video has over 52,000 views and is climbing.

In his Online Video Watch post, Bounced From Beijing For Videoblogging | Online Video Watch, Ben Homer wrote,

"The video... of obnoxious North American students protesting something occurring thousands of miles away from their literal and cultural home is somewhat entertaining, but it’s mostly irritating... The apparent arrogance of these “protesters” notwithstanding this is not be the first time live streaming will be used to capture an event which the Mainstream Media either has no access to or ignores. Independent producers broadcasting live online will continue to play a larger role in media as a whole."

The video below follows the drama previous one which is described below. Noneck goes on camera in the last 15 seconds and says,

"It's the Power of one of these little Qik cameras to go straight up to the internet is pretty amazing... hopefully I'll be able to put it in the hands of NY Times of other friends of mine."

Title: In china, at t square Description: one of the journalists who was recorded the protest had his passport stolen by security/police. 10 mins later his passport was returned.

Soon after these Qik videos were streamed live on August 10, 2008, he wrote the following message on Twitter, "I’m getting deported for filming. Everyone safe. tibet will be free! 6 days ago" and found himself along with a group of others on a flight back to the United States.

Noneck said on his luck of seven blog, that other journalists have been arrested since and offered this perspective,

"For those of you wondering if I'm sad about getting deported, I'm not. I'm happy to have my freedom and highlight the plight the media faces covering the Olympics. since my return, I've now seen the mainstream media use aliased emails, code words for sensitive topics, and rely on anonymous internet drop boxes for posting timely stories. it's unbelievable that even Olympic reporters must use spy-vs-spy tactics to file their stories."

He included this video to emphasize how western journalists are being censored and assaulted for covering Free Tibet protesters.

Fred Benenson noted on his blog:

"What’s interesting is that Facebook seems to be censoring Noneck’s posts about his deportation — his original status updates were deleted but the comments referencing them stayed. My friend Elizabeth observed that all of Noneck’s Facebook status updates that referenced “deportation” have been changed to

a:6:{i:0;i:672053;i:1;i:672054;i:2;i:672056; i:3;i:672057;i:4;i:672058;i:5;i:672059;}. 10:08am Co"

With Qik, you can instantly broadcast a live uncensored feed to world. The event is simultaneously recorded online and the video makes it way through viral channels. The mobile phone becomes a powerful tool when the eyes of the world are watching.

Qik has an official Olympic events page set up here and an RSS feed here with coverage by 17 different Qikkers from August 6th to August 24th.

Related:

Friday, August 15, 2008

Not be Outdone, Flixwagon Now Also Available on iPhone 2.0.1 and 3G

Flixwagon announced yesterday that their live mobile broadcasting application is now available for iPhone 3G and for original iPhones running firmware 2.0.1. On their blog Ken Zamkow says,

"After being first to broadcast from iPhones back in June, and first to launch our public iPhone app for 1.1.4 in July, we're now releasing our app for iPhone 3G and original iPhone 2.0.x. This means we now support all iPhone models and firmware!"

As with Qik, your iPhone will need to be jailbroken with either Cydia or Installer. They have detailed instructions on how to install Flixwagon on their blog and more information on iSpazio. This is an Alpha release and they say that once the iPhone SDK supports native video they'll release an official application on the iPhone app store. They also note that, "We don't encourage 'opening' or 'jailbreaking' iPhones, nor switching back to older firmware, and users do so at their own risk."

Flixwagon also made big news partnering with MTV this past weekend on "Jonas Brothers: Live & Mobile" in a "First-Of-Its-Kind Nonstop Blogging Event" to deliver 6 million video streams to Jonas Brothers fans exceeding previous their records totaling 60,000 hours of content viewed and 281,000 page views.

On the Flixwagon blog Ken Zamkow says,

"Throughout the 36-hour event, a number of MTV bloggers and reporters made live videos directly to the MTV site and TV studio using mobile phones running the Flixwagon application... Even the brothers themselves carried one of the phones and made several live videos throughout the event... Apart from the successful event itself, what we’re also extremely happy about is that we were able to show again how the Flixwagon platform can scale and be customized to fit different types of live broadcasts, in terms of number of concurrent broadcasters, web video streams, and streaming from mobile phones to internet and/or television."

The Viacom press release also noted that,"This combination of mobile broadcasting technology and as-it-happens coverage is reminiscent of News and Docs' series "Diary," but with a live and direct twist."

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Qik Announces First Live Streaming Application for iPhone 3G

Well, it's official! And it's news that I've been waiting to hear. A few hours ago, Michael Fortson of Qik sent out a Tweet saying only, "Stand by :)" and then followed up an hour later with another tweet that said "And we're now on iPhone 3G :) http://tinyurl.com/56mohs"

The link takes you to the Qik blog where the official announcement that says,

"As most of us have been out enjoying the sun, Qik's developers have been working day and night to bring you the world’s first live video streaming application for the Apple iPhone 3G! From the wonderful feedback we get from our fans, we know how eager you all are to get streaming on the iPhone and therefore we have decided to launch straight into public beta"

He included this short video demonstration along with instructions on how to install the application and get started Qikking. He also noted that it is a beta release and that they will be adding regular updates in the coming days and weeks.

I've had the opportunity to enjoy Qik the last month using a loaner Nokia N95 from Nokia WOM/World but had to kiss it goodbye the other day since the trial period was up. I liked it for it's video applications but I wasn't sold on it and I've been researching what device I should purchase to get back on Qik. I've been on the fence about upgrading to the iPhone 3G due to the lack of video support but this announcement just about seals the deal for me. Kudos to Qik and thank you for making this amazing technology and service available to the masses!

For more information:

UPDATE: According to Scoble and CenterNetworks and other sources there are a few issues to keep in mind:
1) This will only work on jailbroken iPhone devices.
2) The issue of iPhone 3G battery life draining quickly by streaming on 3G network.
3) The quality isn't expected to be as good on the iPhone since it uses software compression, where on Nokia phones there’s hardware support for that.
4) The camera isn’t as good as the Nokia camera, particularly in low light.

So if you are interested in jailbreaking your iPhone 2.0 to run Qik, here's Lifehacker's instructions on how to do it using the PwnageTool:

http://lifehacker.com/398906/jailbreak-iphone-20-with-pwnagetool

Monday, August 11, 2008

Streaming Media West: Online Video Publishing Panel Sessions

Streaming Media West is now 6 weeks away and the panel sessions for the conference are just about filled. Here's the two panel sessions that I will be moderating now with the speakers listed for each session. You can get in to see the keynotes for free as well as the exhibit hall and you can still register here for the Pre-Conference and Conference sessions. Stay tuned for more coverage in the coming weeks.

Tuesday, September 23

Online Video Publishing and Marketing Strategies

Track A: (A102) 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

In the world of video publishing, how do you get started? How do you create compelling content? With so many options for live and on-demand video, how do you choose your distribution platform? How do you find your niche? Build your audience? Establish your brand? How do you create a sustainable model to monetize your content and generate income? This is an opportunity to hear some of the most well-known and respected online video publishers discuss online video publishing and marketing strategies.

Moderator:	Larry Kless, Founder, President, OnlineVideoPublishing.com
Presenters:	Sanjay Desai, VP of Product Marketing, Brightcove Eric Hadley, Chief Marketing Officer, Heavy.com Sundance DiGiovanni, Co-Founder, Chief Brand Officer, Major League Gaming Roger Lee, General Partner, Battery Ventures

Thursday, September 25
Updating and Syndicating Your Channels for New Media Distribution

Track B: (B302) 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Many traditional venues for news, information, and entertainment are in the process of transforming from their old ways to the new Web 2.0 models (syndication, tagging, comments, live chat, live streaming). Audience viewing habits have also changed and their demands for engaging social media and interactive features often drive the delivery model. Many online video publishers use different strategies, tools, and services to syndicate multimedia feeds. Learn from some of the people that are changing the way traditional media is being syndicated within their businesses.

Moderator:	Larry Kless , Founder,President Online Video Publishing.com
Presenters:	Andy Plesser, Founder And CEO, Beet.tv Mark Rotblat, VP of Sales and Marketing, TubeMogul Paul Kontonis, CEO, Co-Founder, For Your Imagination Ric Camacho, VP, Digital Syndication, Reuters

For more information go to: http://streamingmedia.com/west/