mobile will be the way all these move forward I think. Unless Qik catches up to the others they will remain a gimmick, the others should be able to add mobile broadcasting pretty easily. The trouble with Qik, and mobile in general is not the services or the software, its either having to own a Nokia handset or jerry-rig something else together using EVDO cards, laptop backpacks or some other contraption. There appears to be an emerging hole in the market for a compact, hi-quality, web ready (wi-fi/GSM/what?) Turn on, shoot, connect, upload…Is there anything like this? Do you think it will appear soon

cheers

I’ve been particularly impressed with the N95 from watching Steve Garfield‘s adventures with it. Way before Qik was available, Steve was getting quality on-the-fly video with a “phone”. At this point, technology is maturing enough to increase the utility of those devices many-fold.

I think “live” is the next frontier. We’ve been through the ability to post video to the internet and have it viewed world-wide. We’ve been through the ability to post comments about that video and eventually to reply with video comments, either through services like YouTube or through WordPress plug-ins. People are now accustomed to interacting with each other via asynchronous video posting. Our interactions with each other are rapidly approaching real-time, and it’s not going to be long before we have live debates between people in various countries around the world. Of course, language will remain a barrier, but geographical location is becoming less and less important. Very soon, we will be able to gather together on the internet as if we all drove to the same location and sat down for food, drinks and fellowship.

Personally, my experience with live internet broadcasting has been following Jonny Goldstein from Reinventing Television on Phovi.com to Jonny’s Par-Tay on his own site. Jonny and I have tested several of the sites you mention in your post. It’s my opinion that the top two features that a “live” site has to facilitate in order to be a “killer app” are 1) audience participation, and 2) user experience after the fact (archiving).

Operator11 (when it wants to work) allows you to have I think 9 people in your “studio”. They’re all currently live, and the operator choses who gets the camera. You can request the camera as a participant, or you can pass control away when you’re finished talking. Another benefit to that site is that you can upload videos to your “library” and play those videos when you’re live on the air. As far as archiving, everyone that was live at the time makes it into the archive, so whomever views the show after the fact gets the same experience as the person who was there for the show…. except for one thing.

I give BlogTV a lot of credit for adding their text chat to their archive. Back in the “Reinventing Television” days, the way to go was to archive the video and repost the text chat by cutting and pasting it. Now, the way BlogTV’s set up, if you watch the video archive, the text chat is available… IN REAL TIME as it was typed during the show! I think that’s a really incredible feature, as I spend a lot of time in the text chat part of my friends’ internet shows, and there’s so much great social interaction that goes on there that is totally lost. When Jonny was on the Jeff Pulver show, we were gigging on Jonny’s tie for about 15 minutes, and unless you were THERE, in the chat room at that time, you don’t know how funny it was! I appreciate that BlogTV has added that feature to their archives, AND that you can toggle viewing the chat on and off with the click of one button.

Right now, I see the big winner as being Qik, because they’re bridging the gap between the ability to record something on the fly and the ability to broadcast it to the world. Now, if a bridge collapses somewhere, you don’t have to wait for the news at 6pm or 11pm to find out about it. You also don’t have to wait for the person recording it to go home, get on their internet connection, upload the video, tag it, blog it, then publicize it. Just about as soon as they record it, it’s available on the internet for people to either watch live or watch immediately after as an archive. That’s incredibly enabling, and that Qik/Nokia combination is looking like the way to go right now if you want to be “Johnny on the spot”.

One service that you didn’t mention is Utterz. They’ve been specializing in audio, but they have video capabilities now as well. It’ll be interesting to see which groups attain the greatest market share going forward….

Cheers!

Here is another one that i like

http://www.stickam.com/

Orit.