New York — With vast number of companies battling the live-streaming wars, mobile service Qik has a new weapon in its arsenal: has introduced its own integration with Facebook’s video application to help users in the live mobile video space to publish their videos to the social network.
Sending a Qik video stream to Facebook via Windows Mobile (Credit: Qik)
Most people are not even aware that such a thing is possible; but thanks to Facebook Connect, Qik members can now not only upload their mobile videos to the Facebook video app, but they can update their status, post it to their wall, and add it to the news feed as well.
Simply stream a live video from your handset and send the link off to some friends that do not hang around blogs and social sites all day — chances are that he will be more amazed by the fact that you are streaming live video from a phone than they are by the content.
For those unacquainted with Qik, it is a mobile streaming video application that is available for most phones that have video capabilities. Windows Mobile smartphone users (non-touchscreen) can also selectively upload Qik videos to Facebook, an extra feature that the company hopes to roll out to other devices soon.
With its Facebook incorporation, users can now post any of those videos to Facebook. This does not require the user to install a Facebook app, but instead simply linking their Qik account to their Facebook account.
However, it is important to note that users cannot use Qik to live-stream videos directly on Facebook, at least not yet. But regardless, it is the first mobile video app to allow automatic uploads to Facebook through the social network’s application program interface, Qik representatives said.
The update is being rolled out immediately. As it is a user profile setting, no updates are needed to the handset software. To get things going, users just log into Qik, pop into the “Edit Networks” screen, and authorize Qik as you would any Facebook Connect service.
Live streaming, similar to location-based mobile networking, is one of those niches of social media that does not have a real front runner yet. Nevertheless, with the passage of time however, all handsets will see updates which improve upon the new functionality. On other handsets, for the time being, Facebook will be updated with all Qik videos set as “public”.
This is a big event for Qik giving a cool example of a company stepping in to improve on Facebook’s existing features. With Qik also having ability to share videos via Twitter, distributing mobile video is becoming a lot simpler.