Friday, May 30, 2008

Streaming-your-life-away

** Update ** looks like I spoke too soon, Qik adding geotagged video-streams too (from Mobile Monday Barcelona)...

Qik, FlixWagon, Kyte, ComVu, Floobs, CometNow, and Bambuser are all mobile broadcasting services, a couple of which I've played with previously. Qik seems to be the mobile geeks current favourite.

These services allow you to broadcast live video from your mobile and stream it to the web - part of the LifeSteaming or LifeCasting tool set, you'll need for a self-produced Truman show, to be a BBC journalist or NASA operations.

You can notify your twitter, jaiku or pownce followers that you're broadcasting live, right now, allowing interactive comments to be posted into the running mobile app's user interface. YouTube integration for direct streaming upload is also possible with Qik and flixwagon.

Bambuser was at the conference I attended last week and not having seen them before I tried it out, downloading the Symbian/S60 client from http://m.bambuser.com

It's similar to Qik and Flixwagon with a straightforward user interface and to start broadcasting just "connect". One of the features it has over the other services is the ability to GeoTag your live video stream (although an additional sis client install is required) so you can view the stream geo-positioned on a GoogleMap.

(Nokia's Sportstracker widget also now supports video upload although its not mobile broadcast streaming.)

Bambuser indicate there's more integration features coming soon, so one to watch ...

For an overview of how to do mobile broadcasting and more details on the above services visit Steve Garfields blog.