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Mobile video - 50 Cent not Joe Soap

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 23 Jun 08, 16:59 GMT

The boss of the mobile video streaming service dropped by this morning - and after an hour spent chatting and recording an interview with him on my mobile, I emerged with a number of conclusions about the instant online video market.

It's not about "live" - it's about getting short bursts of recorded video online quickly and easily. It's not about you, me or any other Joe Soap putting ourselves in front of a global audience - it's about big brands like the rapper 50 Cent. And finally - both those conclusions better be true for Kyte, because if my experience is anything to go by, any ordinary punter without access to loads of bandwidth will find getting their Kyte video online quite frustrating.

Daniel Graf is a young Swiss entrepreneur who has been on a fast journey from a degree in electrical engineering, to working for Philips, to a San Francisco based start-up - Kyte.tv - with backing from the likes of Nokia, Disney and Telefonica.

As we sat in a cafe going live from my mobile, he was keen to stress that, unlike rivals and , the Kyte.tv platform sees "live" as a bit of a sideshow. "Live is not what the internet is about," he said, making the point that far more people will watch a two to five minute piece of recorded video than will watch something streamed live at great length, Fair enough - especially as my mobile told me just five people were watching our interview.

And Kyte isn't really aiming at citizen journalists or mobile bloggers - but big brands who want a one-stop shop for online video. Mr Graf pointed me at which is powered by kyte.tv. It has had 19 million viewers since its launch last November, generating advertising revenue for the rapper, some of which is shared with Kyte. The technology is also being used by some television stations as a cheap and easy way of generating their own online video service.

Kyte, with its big-name backers, may have a better chance of surviving than the likes of Qik or Flixwagon - but surely it faces the same threat as just about any other web 2.0 start-up, being suffocated by Google? The search giant owns , the giant of the online video business, which is using all those Google dollars to expand in every direction - mobile, live, in fact all those places where Kyte is too.

But Daniel Graf insists there is a big difference - he's not building his own brand but offering his technology to existing brands: "We have 99% of our traffic not on Kyte, but from 50 Cent's site, Facebook, and other sites. Kyte.tv is a content production and distribution platform for brands, not a content destination site." Well maybe, but YouTube too is touting itself to all kinds of brands as a distribution platform - after all even Buckingham Palace has its own YouTube channel these days.

And for anyone who is not a big brand, using Kyte.tv to get your video online can be a struggle. You can see my "live" interview with Daniel . But it suffers the same problem I've had with other videos - after about ten seconds it stutters and jumps. My recorded interview uploaded from the phone took two hours to get to the site - and was then incomplete. Only when I transferred it to my laptop and sent it via wi-fi did I get a speedy and .

The reason for my problems, according to Daniel Graf, is bandwidth. In other words, the mobile operator I am using, O2, simply does not have a good enough 3G network in my area to pump the video from my mobile to the internet in a satisfactory fashion. But, as I pointed out, O2 is now owned by Telefonica - which is an investor in Kyte. So maybe he needs to have a word...

For those who saw the online video explosion as a wonderful example of the democratising power of the internet, giving anyone the power to broadcast to the world, the Kyte view is a little depressing. Yes, we can all do it - but it looks as though the mainstream media and the likes of 50 Cent will be more adept at using these tools and winning millions of new viewers.