Television original meaning (from the Greek tele, meaning "far," and the Latin visio, meaning "sight") is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures and sound over long distances. In other words, it is a system, that would naturally endow those using it to show things and events that were happening somewhere else from where the audience would be.

But, most of what we see today on TV is very rarely "reality" as it is happening somewhere else. Even newscasts and sports events now are strongly pre-packaged for television programming with lots of predetermined breaks and sequences that influence quite significantly the type of event you get to be looking at.

As far as I am concerned, live television is all to be re-invented and the new real-time video broadcasting tools that allow just about anyone to switch on their personal broadcasting stations is a tremendous opportunity to leverage this huge entertainment, informational and learning opportunity.

So, as the number of mobile video streaming services increases each month, the real battle is not so much for who has the best performance or video quality, or even the greatest number of videos or viewers, but for who can best create relevant context around such sometimes great, yet so diverse and unpredictable content.

This is why, while John just got excited with QIK and its cool relationship with social media tool Twitter, I am instead sliding down my enthusiasm for the platform which has seen much improvement in its looks, reliability and feature-set, but has made too little progress on creating valuable context around the content its users create. Nonetheless QIK has created a site, Qiklife, entirely devoted to this very specific task, creating context around content, I feel it has not yet succeeded in giving the right exposure and context to the many quality clips submitted daily to its service.

The mistake may be not peculiar to QIK, but representative of a trend that most other personal live video broadcasting services are experiencing. Just like for non-live video on YouTube and other major video sharing sites, it took and it is still taking some time for these services to develop cool and simple ways for quality content to emerge and to be associated with relevant related context.

In fact, it is exciting to see how many new web-based services such as Splashcast, Magnify, Panjea and Videocrawler and many other ones, have been created to leverage the bottom-up, grassroots, spontaneous ability of people like you to create the valuable context and content aggregation without which, whatever gems you have get lost in an ocean of noise.

So, if you are hungry to start experimenting with your own ability to broadcast live from wherever you are check out one of these tools:

• QIK


• Pocketcaster


• Flyxwagon


• Kyte


• Bambuser


• Seero


• Next2friends

If instead, you want to get a deeper feel for what this new media trend is all about, here's John Blossom's own view on the fascination and potential created by the synergy of live mobile video casting and the real-time social news spreading ability of social networking communities as Twitter.

Check it out:

Intro by Robin Good

A Quick Take on Qik: Mobile Social Media is Here. Kind Of.

by John Blossom

In days past people would tune in to late-night talk shows on the television to catch up with banter from stars, politicians and comedians. These days the bleary-eyed can look forward to "tweets" - messages from Twitter members - inviting people to join them in a Qik session.

What is Qik And How You Can Use it

Qik enables people with video-enabled mobile phones to stream their video to the Web and to join in text chats with people who've been notified of their instant events or leave comments. Your Qik videos are stored at Qik's site for later retrieval, building a library of online conversations and events.

A nifty concept, but one that is, like the Twitter network on which people tell people about Qik happenings, a work in progress.

When you first connect to a Qik it's kind of neat - you see people milling about, things happening, so you type in a chat message and then...nothing happens. In the few Qiks that I've received so far, the signal drops within a few minutes at most and there doesn't seem to be any self-sustaining chats.

Like in Twitter's early phases (and for that matter until the code jocks arrived there a few days ago) Qiks come and go with the tantalizing promise of something interesting that isn't delivering up to its potential just yet.

I was especially intrigued by Robin Good 's late-night visit to a jazz club in Rome - a lot more fun to be part of that than your typical conference mixer. Robin Good has made active use of Qik for several months, but the use of Twitter in combination with Qik adds a real-time messaging aspect to the service for people on the go that enables them to catch things as they're happening.

Qik includes GPS-enabled location information as well, so a quick tweet can let you peek in on a scene and see if it's worth checking out and then check the location information to see where it is.

Business For Qik

It's not clear that there's much of a business model for Qik - probably destined for an exit in the next year would be my guesstimate - but in the meantime I think that it's bringing us one step closer to mobile video calls that will provide meaningful personal content to both personal and general audiences.

As with Twitter, Qik seems to have its own personal protocols that need to be mastered - do that many people know how to get people to put on a good video show? - but short of that with the combo of Twitter and Qik I think that we'll be hearing a lot more about mobile video in the year ahead. I'm waiting for a Qik driver that works with my phone (or for a new phone later this year) but I think that I'll give it a shot the next time that I am at a trade show. It would be a lot nicer to shoot Qik segments of vendors and then just line up links to them on my blog than to fuss with stringing together video segments into a cohesive video blog entry.

Looking forward to your Qik tweets!

Originally written by John Blossom for Content Nation and first published on 24th June 2008 as "A Quick Take on Qik: Mobile Social Media is Here. Kind Of."

John Blossom's career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media.

Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.

Photocredits
A Quick Take on Qik: Mobile Social Media is Here. Kind Of: Leah-Anne Thompson
Business For Qik: Eray Haciosmanoglu