With all of the collaboration going on between Qik and Nokia over the past few months, it seemed like it wouldn’t be too long before Nokia went ahead and put the live mobile video broadcasting service onto handsets right out of the box. Sure, enough: Beginning with this morning’s release of the North American N97, Qik will come preloaded onto all Nokia S60-based phones.
This is exactly what we thought had happened months ago with the Nokia 5800, though we later found out that, while Qik did make an appearance on the device, it was simply an icon that led to a download page. This time around, Qik comes installed and ready to go.
This is a fairly significant win for Qik; beyond all the technical hurdles involved with streaming live video from a mobile phone, one of the most challenging things is getting people to use it. Nokia’s been featuring Qik pretty prominently in their Ovi Store, and the aforementioned preloaded download link are nice – but convincing people to make the leap, download the app, register an account, and broadcast their lives seems like a tough sell. Remove one of the steps, and it becomes slightly less so.
Congrats! Great news for qik.
Cool – I love that game. I used to play it in the arcades in the 80s. The facebook version called qilox is nowhere near as fun as the original. I wonder if I can download Qix for my Nokia N95.
It’s also a delicious cereal.
this is a huge step forward for quik and a hard backlash for bambuser and kite.
still, i am not convinced that people will actually use quik as much as expected. i remember the first days of video telephony on mobile phones (in austria in the 3 net) – everyone was talking about it but noone was using it.
Few people’s lives are interesting enough to broadcast regularly.
While many qik videos may not be interesting to everybody, they tend to be very interesting to somebody.
For example, I qik’d the ultrasound images from the first time I saw my child we’re expecting. I was then able to share that video and experience with my family and friends.
I think this story plays right into the other posting today about Cisco’s perception of future traffic and that 64% of mobile IP traffic will be video.
Well done qik!
Nokia? They used to make cell phones, right?
Let me guess, iPhone owner?
Yawn. Nokia invested in Qik so I guess they are trying to salvage their investment that is going down the drain.
I heard they are having major trouble raising money.
Nokia invested in Kyte, not Qik, which makes this news even more interesting.
Nokia still has a 40%+ market share worldwide.
People use mobile phones outside of North America.
@John Almer
is correct that Nokia invested in Qik. Another reason why I would take a strategic investment over a straight VC deal.
Does anyone know how Qik makes money?
Anything can pick up. Though I think the ability to just post videos straight to Youtube is feature enough. A live stream that ANYONE can broadcast? When everyone’s looking to be able to have access to media that doesn’t always have to be live but can be watched at anytime?
Qik is going nowhere slow.