This morning I had the opportunity to have a chat with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP of Product Management of Qik, a popular live video casting application available on most major mobile platforms. It’s not the first time we’ve interviewed him but, with competition at an all time high, I figured it was time to check back in.
The interview was conducted over IM and later formatted to fit within the traditional Q&A structure.
We last spoke to you way back in june, when you were getting ready to launch Qik on a few windows mobile devices. Whats new? Whats going on in the world of Qik?
A number of things. We now support Blackberry (alpha stage) as a smartphone platform. We also have support for a number of J2ME (java-enabled) devices (these are the feature phones that are typically given away by carriers), and for (jailbroken) iPhones. What you’ll notice is that we are starting to play around with location support.. people can instantly know where a person is streaming from (of course with the permission of the user) and to what detail they want to show that.
So essentially we are adding more devices, and seeing more of mass market pickup of our service. Users are starting to use Qik more as a communication service to share what they are doing live with their friends and family.
How have client downloads been? Any numbers you can share?
I cant share exact details – but what I can say is that we have over 100k users using the service from more than 150 countries. [Another] thing that we have done is made it really simple for anyone to get up and running. Basically you can go to http://d.qik.com from your phone and, if your phone is supported, it will prompt you and get you up and running in seconds.
We are seeing a shift of viewing videos from phones. People are viewing quite a few qiks directly from their phones (since we now have a WAP site, and an iPhone-optimized site)
Can we expect an Android port any time soon?
The challenge with G1 is that it does not inherently support video capturing. We are looking at it to figure out their roadmap around video, and we’ll then see how we can take advantage of the platform.
Which platform is proving to be the most popular for Qik so far?
That depends very much on a country level. Here in US we are seeing more WM, iPhone and BB adoption. Overall I’d say that WM, S60, iPhone are the leaders.
Speaking of the iPhone: What’s the status of Qik on the iPhone? Video recording and the App Store don’t generally mix, and last I heard it hadn’t been submitted for Apple’s approval yet. Has that changed? Are there actual intents on getting the Qik app into the store, or do you expect it to stay jailbreak-only?
We have not submitted to app store yet. There are a few things we are working on. Once those items are completed we’ll figure out next steps with the app store, but the intent is to release this app in App Store for all iPhone users
Any indication from Cupertino as to whether they’d let Qik through?
Don’t know, as we have not even tried that yet.
Last we spoke, you mentioned that an expecting mother had streamed the birth-giving process to her husband through Qik. Has anything crazy like that happened since?
We have had more births, weddings. Also, now the media around the Pope uses Qik to capture Pope travels. We have Ashton Kutcher using qik
Who gets more viewers, Kutcher or the Pope?
[Laughs] Let me check their profiles, hold on.
- http://qik.com/ashton [8,221 views to the channel since 9/19/08]
- http://qik.com/h2onewscrossmedia [13,871 views to the channel since 7/12/08]
H2onews is the media company for Vatican. Oh also recently – Victoria Secret backstage was covered using Qik (http://qik.com/blog/273/victorias-secret-fashion-show–backstage-exclusive), and the BBC has been using this for getting citizen’s voice as as a part of the BBC Have Your Say project.
You guys have a number of competitors. Why should someone new to the mobile life casting world go with Qik?
Firstly, mobile broadcasting is just one of the things that people do. We are finding people using this more for communications than broadcasting – especially now with the ability to playback videos from the phone, etc. (Example: Someone receiving a SMS can play the recorded video right from their phone without having to go to a computer at all)
There are a number of technical differentiators we have, like:
- Broadest range of phone coverage. Doing this on N95 is one thing, but doing it across all S60 devices (that have different CPU processing powers, battery levels, camera specs) is another. Then on top of that add other platforms Windows Mobile (which has its own variants of PocketPC vs smartphone and from different manufacturers that have their own specs). Then take iPhone, Blackberry, J2ME.
- We still have the least latency + best quality (can do 640×480 SD quality over WiFi or 3.5g)
- Live is only one aspect – being able to have a high quality video after the fact is another (We have a patent filed on this)
- We are the only ones who cover the situation where if your battery dies in the middle or for some reason your video does not get uploaded. We can automatically detect this next time you start and send that out (patent filed on this)
- We’ve also filed a patent on the way streaming can be done through J2ME phones as Java does not inherently allow it
Finally – we have built it as a complete platform (rather than destination) so that anyone can integrate Qik mobile live streaming into their apps. People can stream live to their own flash players rather than ours, like we do with our partner Mogulus, where users don’t even know that it is a Qik stream they are watching getting broadcasted to the Mogulus flash player
So broadly speaking 3 areas where we do well: (a) Phone coverage, (b) Technology of live streaming from phones itself from disparate platforms and taking care of various conditions, (c) Platform approach to enable mobile live streaming to any site any social network and any Flash Player.
By the way – another point in the details: We are the only one that has shown live streaming from both GSM and CDMA networks. We support even Verizon and Sprint networks here in US (CDMA), while the others require you to be on AT&T or T-mobile (GSM).
I’m sure you saw yesterday that Ustream.tv is planning on entering the mobile scene. Any response?
They are approaching this from a broadcast point rather than communication like we are. The main thing here is that we are building Qik as a platform for people to share live video from their phones to their friends and family and their world, such that it can be consumed and experienced from the web and other devices and create a level of interaction therein. Ustream and others are building this out as a destination site for live broadcasting
What’s next for Qik?
You’ll see us marching down the path of enabling people to share live experiences from their phones to any connected device, and building out the platform even further to enable anyone and everyone to build mobile live streaming as a part of their site or product offerings.
As Qik’s first user, I find the service very cool, but I find that more and more I’m moving away from it for a few reasons:
1. cell phone video is cool at first, but then you keep finding areas where it doesn’t work well and you can’t get the HD quality you can get with a newer HD camera and YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug, or Vimeo.
2. The chat room sucks in comparison to Ustream, Stickam, or Kyte.tv.
3. You can’t use your laptop’s camera, your FlipCam, or other recorded video on the service. That’s why I’ve been showing up on Kyte.tv more lately.
4. The service and/or bandwidth sometimes goes away right in the middle of doing something important (like filming a press conference) and there’s often nothing you can do about it. While on Kyte I can switch to a recording and use the service just fine when the connection comes back up.
5. I like the player on Kyte better and it’s embedable in more places.
But, Qik is better for many uses and I still use it from time to time to take videos of my family because it’s easier to use for many personal things. I hope that 2009 brings lots of upgrades to Qik so I can use it for more than just my videos of my family.
Nice interview.
The application looks awesome. :cool:
nice interview http://www.eskibirsaat.com
Qik is broad platform.
Ustream will add mobile for their millions of users.
I understand the why Ustream would do this. For Qik though, how do they make money?
If they are able to sell this technology to the cellphone carriers, then that makes sense to me.
I do think Ustream entering Mobile does hurt Qik’s potential adoption.
Very Nice. Hopefully we will see some more great things coming!
Qik is a neat technology, but too far ahead of its time. I have it on my iPhone and on 3G the video just isn’t really watchable.
I do applaud Qik, Ustream, etc for pushing the tech limits. The US carrier network just sucks…
Congrats Qik, Congrats Ustream.
@Scoble Agree, ultimately the destinations like Ustream/Facebook will win if they enter mobile (which Ustream is apparently)
I bet the carriers build this technology themselves at some point and pre-installing on the phone, making Qik useless.
Sorry, mobile live video quality SUCKS all around.
I can’t watch anything on qik longer than 2 seconds before my head hurts…
Hope Ustream atleast improves the quality
if QIK manages to swindle further funding of as much as another $1 from anyone, then their real product is snake oil. The video quality is H.O.R.R.I.B.L.E.
And it’s not going to get better, in a long, long time. It’s not QIK’s fault… it’s mobile data is a terrible data layer … mobile voice is hardly usable in many areas.
This is what happens when non-techies gloss over the hard realities of technologies and get funding to build products which cannot meet spec no matter how much the tweaking.
Anyway can’t wait for android :(
its good to see an indian making news on techcrunch :)
Qik works great on Wifi. That was my normal use case when I started one year ago. But now, I have to admit, the excitement is lost a little bit. It’s hard work to be an always on cameraman for others. And also: Who has the time to see all this unedited footage?
I still can´t realize why they would say that they deliver least latency and best quality.
-”We still have the least latency + best quality (can do 640×480 SD quality over WiFi or 3.5g)” when there is services like bambuser who do it so much better, there is an enormous difference in latency. I mean the magic of live is the ability to interact with the person that is live, but with qik it is like making a phone call to Australia 20 years ago
- hello…
(20sec later)
- hello
Due to the fact that their service cannot stay live or real-time, make it loose the magic of live video it disables the interactivity. Ustreams mobile video looked promising, but still slow. Qik just feels like a version of a new way to upload video, not to stream live video, and there I find Shozu as a much better service to upload videos to the web.
We need to see latencys down to 1 or 2 seconds otherwise the psycology of man cant interact, or we have to redefine the term live since I do not experience qik to be live. Maybe I am wrong?
In the interest of full disclosure, how much ownership do you have in Qik?
Most of the so-called patents are already in use and were actually there at flixwagon to begin with. E.g. – supporting a dead battary scenario was introduced by flixwagon at the begining of 2008, while qik added the support only a few month back. Latency is not always the best with qik (just saw a clip comparing them to ustream’s client and they are far behind…) and it mainly depends on where you are located…
I am writing this comment since I see these “marketing” inaccuracies in almost all of Roy’s statements – i do think Qik is a nice product, but why not be honest?
At least you got to give Techcrunch the credit for keep trying to put QIK in front of their competitors.. Too bad the days where not real technology and a lot of back wind would take you somewhere.
As said above it is a cool app but nothing more and with the market meltdown, if they don’t get a business model working there will be no good ending to this story.
But again.. great PR work Michael
Have been using Qik since the very beginning and I think it is the best and most innovative service ever.
Keep up the great work!
QIK does one thing, and it does it better than anyone else. Stream live video from the camera in your cell phone directly to the internet… did I say L*I*V*E*? QIK is simple, Qik is easy, Qik is FREE. The people behind QIK go out of their way and move mountains to makes sure every QIK user has a smooth experience.
Don’t confuse or compare Qik to other “similar” services… they do streaming… and… and… and.. and it gets too complicated.
If you want one button live video streaming from your phone, QIK rocks.
As a matter of fact, I will be at the CES show in Las Vegas streaming live with my Nokia N95 exclusively via QIK. Make sure you subscribe to http://www.TheBurtonReport.com ad free / sponsor free tech blog to see the action.
Who said you can’t record and upload using Qik. I use it all the time from my Nokia N95. Just disconnect from the network – record and then when you want connect and the video will be streamed out. Pretty darn simple!
I can do all of it with flixwagon on my nokia 6120 and I get real good quality! I am also using it to upload my video’s to Nokia Ovi automatically. I can’t find a good reason to move to QIK after reading this post….but I’ll sure be waiting for more features ! let the best one win.
@ariburton well said. Qik really rocks on live and is really really simple to use. I have tried every mobile video service there is and have settled to using qik on a regular basis.
@peter have tried every solution out there as well and am sticking to Qik as well – both for their great product and the people. They are the only ones who can do 640×480 live video over WiFi. However, will not suggest using the 640×480 mode on 3G – has ways to go there.
Also, had the pleasure of meeting them in their office – and they have a great team that is not just very talented but go out of their way to help and listen you out. They are the company to watch – as they go out of their way to make sure that you not only have a great experience with their product but also with them as people.
Is this a joke? How can Qik still claim that they have least latency? Isn’t that Ustream-video pretty obvious… even Kyte has lower latency and try to do the Ustream-thing with Bambuser and Qik. Qik has a nice interface though, and good platform support.
web video still needs a lot of work, the limited screen size on a mobile is a major drawback of it ever really becoming more than a toy no matter the software or platform
I love Qik. And it’s simplicity and interface is much easier to navigate as compared to kyte or flixwagon. Though there are latencies in the videos, it’s user experience is just really easy for me to navigate.
Not sure about ustream. We’ll just wait and see.
a phone is used by me three years ,sonyerission….ha..
Qik should go back to its last round of investors and say ’sorry————–we did misrepresent our service; and we are willing to renegotiate the valuation to say a $5M post and can you provide an additional million or 2′. Otherwise—Qik is dead–they will not raise addt capital without investor revolt especially with all the other big claimants in the niche.
Qik is amazing and have the best service. Period. I am amazed how fast they have got live streaming going from so many devices – while others struggle to make this work even with the high end Nokia phones.
agree with “European”, Bhaskar’s claim that Qik have the least latency is plain rubbish. Anyone who has tried Bambuser (www.bambuser.com) knows there is an Atlantic ocean in difference between the latency of the two services, with Bambuser being far superior.
Qik has done a lot of great things, like a cool web site, very user friendly service and so on. Unfortunately latency is still not good enough in most conditions to give a live feel and allow live interactions.
US mobile networks are stone age technology compared to what is seen in many European and Asian countries. Live streaming is therefore poised to take off in Europe and Asia well before it takes off in the US. This could give companies like Bambuser (Sweden) and even a tiny player like Molv (Maldives) an edge over Qik.