Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

I have for the past 10 years worked on, waited and begged for a solution that could provide a video feed from your mobile to the net in a slick and user friendly way.

A few years back I set up a company with my mate Luke Ritchie who now works for amaze.tv. We called it 5past and our aim was to provide both premium content and user generated content (streaming & download). Things looked bright as technologies like 3GPP and Quicktime Broadcaster were gaining momentum and even Nokia, SonyEricsson and Motorola were playing ball. None of the big three had opened up their platforms for 3rd party software yet. But the real party poopers were networks like Vodafone and Telenor who demanded ridiculous commercial terms, resulting in even more ridiculous end user costs. Unlimited data plans etc. that are part of the formula making the iPhone a success was unheard of and when we mentioned anything of that kind most people thought we were barking mad. So to cut a long story short, the project stranded and we poured our energy back into our studies (did we not Luke?)

What is cool is that with regular intervals companies and websites pop up who try to break this new market. Sites like kyte.tv have been giving it a go for quite some time now, but my bet is that qik.com probably have the best chance so far to create the first successful service in the UGC spectrum of the marked. The overall concept follows pretty much the same formula as any other video UGC site, except the content is recorded/streamed and distributed from a mobile phone, allowing for a whole new world of content and scenarios. Once we get the mobile phone fully integrated with the proper web, we will see some amazing services, the possibilities are endless.

Check out qik.com here: http://qik.com/

Posted by Johan on 25 Mar 08, at 4:59 pm

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