As we first reported last night, Apple is finally allowing live streaming video applications into the App Store. Apple’s acceptance of the Ustream Live Broadcaster has seemingly paved the way for other live-streaming apps. And one of the best known ones, Qik, is wasting little time to get its app out there. The company writes in a blog post today that they’ve already submitted their app for approval.
I’ve actually had the Qik live-streaming app on my iPhone for a while, thanks to the magic of ad-hoc distribution. Unfortunately, Apple’s policies restrict the number of copies Qik can send this way, so the application remained mostly a proof-of-concept for most people. Given how quickly Qik submitted the app to the store, we expect the official build that will likely get approved to be the same one we have been using, which we reviewed here. It’s solid, but the video quality leaves a little to be desired compared to some competing video apps (none of which did live streaming).
Like Ustream, Qik did release a version of its app that allowed users to upload videos — but not live videos, until now.
Following Ustream and Qik, you can probably expect other companies like 12seconds to get into the iPhone live streaming game as well. Once all these apps are available, the question is how much will people use them? Services like Qik in particular seemed hot among some of the tech elite last year, but this year have seemed to have large cooled off. Perhaps that’s because people have been ditching their Nokia phones (it seemed like everyone was using the N95 with Qik for a while) in favor of devices like the iPhone. Now that these apps are allowed on the iPhone, will we see a resurgence of links to live streams on Twitter again?
Below find some examples of Qik videos I shot with my iPhone 3GS using the ad-hoc version of the app.
http://qik.com/swfs/qikPlayer4.swf
http://qik.com/swfs/qikPlayer4.swf
