Today Qik announced the alpha release of its the popular live mobile streaming client for Blackberry. Within less than a year Qik has broadened its platform across mobile devices since the first release for the Nokia N95.Read the full press release here and the Qik blog post, Qik now live with alpha release client for BlackBerry by bhaskar » QIK.
Bhaskar Roy says, "One of the most frequent requests we've had from Qik fans has been for a BlackBerry client. Today we are really excited to announce our alpha release clients for the BlackBerry Pearl 8120, BlackBerry Pearl 8130, and BlackBerry Bold. BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 will follow soon."
"Initially, one of Qik's signature features will be absent from all BlackBerry models: the ability for viewers watching real-time videos to interact via instant messages. Qik tells us that the live chat feature is running into a "text and camera app issue." In Qik, the incoming instant message lays over the video, something that's not built in to the BlackBerry platform." - from Qik announces streaming video for BlackBerry | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET
Jason Kincaid says, "This brings Qik to a much broader platform, and also helps cement Qik’s lead in terms of device support well ahead of competitors Kyte and Flixwagon, neither of which support Blackberry. However, Qik will have another competitor on the Blackberry platform: today’s news comes hot on the heels (and may have been prompted by) the launch of Next2Friends
, the first streaming video application that supported Blackberries." - fromQik Finally Brings Its Live Video Streaming To Blackberry - TechCrunch
Earlier this month Qik also added alpha support on mass market J2ME phones "a.k.a feature phones, a.k.a non-smartphones a.k.a non-PDA phones" and you can see that video announcement below. Qik now comes pre-loaded on Nokia's new touchscreen device called the XpressMusic 5800.
MG Seigler says, "Of course, there are two hot devices that the service isn’t available on yet: The Apple iPhone and the G1 (T-Mobile’s Google Android-based phone). The G1 was just launched a few days ago, and only has some 60+ applications that users can download in the Android Market right now. More will come, and you can bet one of those will be Qik... The company’s parent, Visivo Communications raised a $3 million round back in April. Since then, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have also invested in the company." - from Qik sweetens its mobile streaming video roster with BlackBerry support. iPhone coming soon » VentureBeat
What about the iPhone? Kevin Rose may be right because a few days ago Scoble visited Qiks headquarters and they loaded "a very early version of their iPhone streaming video app onto my iPhone" and he recorded this video. He said, "Note that this is NOT a jailbroken iPhone, but they needed to do some magic to build me an app that’ll only run on my iPhone. I don’t know when it’ll be submitted to Apple as an official application. But for now I’m having fun trying it out."
Bhaskar Roy clarifed that, "We are looking into this, but at present are not sure when and how this will happen." - from Qik on App Store - clarification by bhaskar » QIK
Visit Qik to download the Blackberry application.
