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Mobile video - are we getting there?

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 17 Jun 08, 10:52 GMT

Ever wanted to find a new way of annoying fellow passengers on the train? Well try shouting "Hi, I'm on the video!" very loudly at your mobile phone. That's what I've been doing for the last couple of hours on a train from London to Newcastle.

Why? Well it seemed a good place to conduct an experiment. I've been toying with all kinds of mobile and web video applications over the last year - from to , from to . None of them seemed to deliver the combination of flexibility, ease of use, and acceptable picture quality that I was seeking.

Then I read a by West Coast uber-blogger claiming Kyte was the one that was going to sweep all others aside. Now I'd tinkered with Kyte last year and lost patience but when I returned to its site I found that it was boasting a whole new platform with the promise of delivering video from anything from a webcam to a mobile phone - with easy viewing also available on mobiles.

After downloading the application onto my mobile phone, I had a go with posting some video - the trouble was that it only seemed to deliver a 20 second chunk before stopping. So I went to Twitter and posted "Not sure about kyte.tv." Such is the power of the social web that a PR man was emailing me within hours to tell me just how wonderful Kyte really was.

Hence the trial. As we left King's Cross, I began trying out four different mobile video solutions. First Seesmic - with a video recorded on my laptop's webcam and then uploaded via the free wi-fi on the train. Then I began to punish the mobile phone - and my fellow passengers - with short video messages using the Flixwagon, Qik, and Kyte applications I had downloaded onto the phone previously.

Both the Qik and the Flixwagon applications promise "live" streaming of your video - rather risky when you could be brained by an irate bystander midstream - but in practice "live" means a delay of a couple of minutes while it chugs across the 3G connection to the web.

At the moment, the Kyte application allows me to record a short burst, then decide whether to upload it - though apparently live streaming is in beta testing right now, and according to Robert Scoble, will sweep all other applications aside.

So what do the results look like? Well as I write from the train I'm not entirely sure, though you should be able to judge by following these links on , , and .

The quality and usability of all of these services still has a long way to go - though more sophisticated handsets and improving mobile bandwidth are helping - but the big question concerns the audience. Why would anyone want to watch dodgy bits of video of my train trip - or your walk with the dog?

The answer can be split into two - the micro and mass audiences. As these tools become common it may become as normal for you to broadcast video of your journey home to your loved ones as it is to shout "I'm on the train" right now - dreadful prospect though that is.

But there is also great potential to combine mobile video with tools like to enable anyone at a newsworthy event to broadcast to a mass audience. Last night, for instance, I was keeping up with Euro 2008 on the journey home by searching Twitter messages containing the word "Austria".

Now if a Twitterer in the crowd had been using one of the mobile video applications I could have also received an instant video playback of the goal. Which raises all sorts of questions for professional broadcasters...

I must now put away my mobile and let my fellow passengers get some peace - but do let me know what you think of the likes of Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon, and whether you think we'll all be broadcasting from our mobiles within a couple of years.