Stream Live Video From a Cell Phone
"Is there a way I can stream live video direct from my cell phone to the Internet?"
A number of services are springing up to allow you to stream video using the data connection and video camera on your cell phone. Several years ago, Nokia made a limited introduction of this functionality, but the N series camera phones were expensive and very few people owned them. Android phones and Apple's iPhone have blown the market wide open for streaming video from your cell phone, with solid applications that stream your video through free subscription-based video streaming sites. While there are several choices, I will cover my favorite service.
Qik Video Connect
My preferred method of live streaming from an Android phone is Qik Video Connect. My T-Mobile phone has a custom version of Qik designed for T-Mobile. Sprint offers a similar custom app for their users. iPhone users have an app called Qik Video Connect PLUS at their disposal. Windows Mobile, Symbian, and BlackBerry also have access to Qik video streaming for some cell phone model. For those without a "custom" solution, there's a more generic Qik Video Connect. These are all basically the same app with a slightly different user interface.
The Qik service is owned by Skype and works for both live video chat between two phones, as well as for recording live video that streams to your qik.com page. If you make your video public, people can watch anytime you are streaming live from your phone. If you have a website or blog, your Qik account allows you to embed your video on a page, making it easy to integrate a live video stream in your blog.
Setting Up Qik VIdeo Connect
To stream live video from your cell phone, the first thing you need to do is create an account at qik.com. Your account is where you upload videos and where you access the embed code for you live stream.
Once you have an account, the next thing you need is the app installed on your phone.
For Android users, download Qik Video Connect from the Android Market.
For iPhone, download Qik Video Connect PLUS from the iTunes App Store.
Other cell phones will need to go through their respective app stores or download marketplace.
With the Qik application installed, sign in to your Qik account in the application, choose the Record & Share option. To live stream to the web, make sure the privacy setting for the recording is set to public and click the record button. You can perform a test to see your video stream working by opening your Qik account page in your computer browser. You should expect a few seconds of delay between the time you start recording and the time the image appears on the Web. When you are finished with your live stream, simply stop recording. Qik will save the recording, so that people can watch it later too.