Can you tell a story while filming something on your cellphone? Do people want to watch a live video streamed from a journalist's cellphone?
These are questions all writers need to be asking--it's almost as important as the question, "Will people upload videos to YouTube?" was in 2006. If you can find news and narrate, there will be plenty of opportunities for you on the mobile web.
The infrastructure already exists for you to report and film any event live from your cellphone with a website called Qik. Over at Lost Remote, Cory Bergman built the most amazing set of links that study and teach you how to jump on the live-video bandwagon.
As you can see from the Robert Scoble linked above, the video work isn't anything fancy--but it gets the job done if you manage to quickly corner the founders of YouTube. Check it out:
"Self-described “lifecaster” and internet cutie Sarah Meyers is packing around a high-def camera, microphone and laptop with an EVDO card to webcast live via both PopSnap and Mogulus (she started on Justin.tv). You can see how she does it in this ZDNet video clip."
It is really great to see Qik come out and give you a way to do this stuff from your cell phone and it can only get better from here. Really it is fun to watch this stuff evolve and mature.
Once the picture quality is a little better I can imagine reporters using this kind of technology to go into disaster zones. The news van with the giant satellite tower will no longer be needed.
Posted by: smojo | January 9, 2008 12:59 PM | Permalink to Comment