Live video streaming from a mobile phone

OK, so this panel discussion might not be the most watchable or listenable-to (?) piece of video you've ever seen but that's not really surprising.

What is quite mind-blowing is that it was taken with a 3G mobile phone and was streamed live (and recorded for posterity) using a service called Qik.

It was taken by Robin Hamman at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels yesterday.

It kind of reminds me of the earliest television broadcasts (not that I'm old enough to remember them of course) - not brilliant quality but the potential is mind-blowing.

As Hamman says:

The potential for this is incredible. From now on, every journalist will have the ability to get usable video content on air almost instantly using nothing but a mobile phone that fits easily in their pocket. Activists will be able to stream live from protests. Concert goers can share their front row seats with friends at home. Privacy concerns aside, the ability to stream live video from a cameraphone, and for that video to be instantly available around the world via the internet, really is awesome.

It's the quality of the journalism that counts, not that of the medium

More on the BBC's multimedia experiment with mobile phone video. I'm going to be urging all of our journalists and editors to take a look at the results of the BBC's experiment.


Rory Cellan-Jones explains here the process they used when video blogging from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

As RCJ admits, opinions are divided over what is the "appropriate" level of quality but that may be mostly about the "appropriate" level of quality for the BBC.

He thinks a tripod and a better mic would probably have worked wonders.

Interesting, though.

BBC video blogs with mobile phones

Thanks to Trevor Goodman for bringing my attention to this... The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones and Darren Waters will be video blogging using their mobile phones from the Mobile World Congress.

It's obviously a bit of a gimmick, but for the BBC to be effectively saying the quality of the picture isn't the same thing as the quality of the post should be reassuring to the journalists who still believe that every video report requires expensive kit and technicians. If the BBC is up for it...

Here's the introduction: