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Darren Waters

Going live from a mobile

  • Darren Waters
  • 25 Feb 08, 19:35 GMT

Mobile phones are transforming into multimedia devices. From photos to GPS and video phones are being put to extreme challenges.

One Silicon Valley based firm, Qik.com, has developed a tool which turns your phone into a live broadcasting system.

I'm meeting the CEO of Qik later today and will be broadcasting the interview live on my phone - a first for the Dot.Life blog, and probably a first for أغر؟´«أ½ News.

You can watch the interview here live from about 00.30 GMT (Tuesday) or 1630 PST (Monday).

UPDATE: So I "went live" from my mobile phone for the first time today. I did a quick interview with the CEO of Qik.com Ramu Sunkara and then sat down with some of the firm's staff to discuss life as a start-up and to get a measure of their ambitions.

The first thing to note is that the technology works as advertised. Qik is a piece of software you download to your phone that both buffers and sends footage back in real time to the Qik servers, which transcode the video into flash.

You can embed your Qik "channel" on pretty much any website and people can watch your exploits live, leave comments, or watch the video back later as it sits on Qik's servers.

Qik is a great example of how mobile phones are taking full advantage of technologies which are collapsing into one device - multimedia capabilities, messaging, always on connections and the robustness of the phone's operating system.

But for Qik to ultimately succeed it requires the coalescence of a number of things - first the continued evolution of network capability, which is a bit of a given.

Then the removal of costs barriers around data charges, which appears to happening.

Finally, it needs a paradigm shift in how people approach mobile video because the "live" element changes everything.

The great strength of mobile handsets is that they transcend space and time. Video can be recorded and then played back on the net, via sites like YouTube, whenever we want.

Do we want our lives to be actually "live"?

Ramu Sunkara believes we do.

I think Qik offers great potential for bloggers, citizen journalists and potentially professional broadcasters.

As Flash codecs improve and bandwidth on cell networks develop there is terrific scope to do some of our reporting live via a phone.

The big question for Qik is how can they make money?

Bhaskar Roy from the firm told me that Qik is currently focused on its community, growing its users and improving the experience.

The firm also sees itself as a potential mobile video partner for third parties - and I was told of one such arrangement the firm will announce in a few weeks time.

My one question that keeps nagging at the back of mind though is - does the mainstream want to broadcast live from a phone? What do you think?

Rory Cellan-Jones

YouTube and Pakistan - how did it happen?

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 25 Feb 08, 14:30 GMT

Just before Darren Waters broke the story about YouTube's outage last night, I was fielding calls from friends questioning my technical competence. I had posted a video of a recent ski-ing holiday on YouTube, and emailed the link to my fellow skiers - only to hear from them that the video just wouldn't play.

Computer screen showing YouTubeSo I was rather relieved to discover that it was a global outage - rather than my incompetence - which was frustrating my friends and millions of other YouTube users. At first Google told me it was unlikely to have anything to do with Pakistan, or the row over alleged anti-Islamic material on the site.

But by this morning YouTube's owners had decided otherwise - and released this statement:

"For about two hours, traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site. We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the internet community to prevent this from happening again."

Hmmmm - well I'm not sure that makes it a lot clearer. But here is how a spokesman from the - which handles huge amounts of internet traffic - explained it to me, with great patience.

So the Pakistani authorities order the country's ISPs to block access to YouTube. That is done by the country's telecoms provider sending out what is, in effect, a new - and false - route to get to YouTube. The result is that any traffic from Pakistani users to YouTube gets directed into a cul-de-sac. So far, so normal, for any country - China, Turkey, Iran - which decides to control its population's access to certain websites.

But what appears to have happened in this case is that the dodgy route map somehow leaked beyond Pakistan's borders, and was adopted by the giant Asian telecoms business . Once it started broadcasting this new way to find YouTube, the rest of the world's ISPs altered their maps, sending everyone up the wrong road.

Which all raises some interesting issues. The internet is an open self-correcting mechanism which runs on trust - if someone announces a new route to YouTube, others will take it as read that they are acting in good faith.

What we need to know now is whether this was a mistake or a deliberate attempt by Pakistan to disrupt YouTube beyond its own borders. Google still isn't sure - but it must now be aware that it and other global businesses are vulnerable to attacks from hostile governments.

A decade ago it was widely assumed that the internet would defeat attempts by governments to control freedom of speech and thought. But in this latest encounter the score looks like Government 1 - Internet 0.

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