It was a cold morning at Redwood City when our faithful coach driver, Steve pulled up at the Qik office. We were ushered in to a pretty pretty warm room by Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP of Qik. 

Qik is currently based in Redwood City while their other operation operate in Russia. Qik enables live video casting from a cell phone via any 3G/GPRS/Wi-fi Internet connection. Qik streams the video straight into the site with a delay of as little as half a second to two seconds.

Core Technology: Spent 1 year+ to develop their codecs and compression. Much time was invested in this area and much time would be needed for competitors to catch up in the technology.

 

Revenue model?

1. Subscription based revenue: eg. potential customers like NBC, CNN have expressed interest to have a subscription service with Qik. This is because of the capability of Qik’s quick upload of videos online.

2. Telco Carrier revenue: eg. AT&T can ride on Qik as a marketing tool to push their 3G handsets and service plans. In fact, currently 70 handsets are Qik supported.

 

YouTube as potentially destructive if YouTube were to enter the live streaming space?

What I first thought would be a potential big competitor, but it turned out to be wrong as Bhaskar shared that his company is in partnership talks with YouTube. The reason behind YouTube being not a competitor is because YouTube has different focuses. I thought it was interesting to see how one company collaborates with potential competitors to form a relationship rather than going head on each other. In fact, Qik was the recent mobile video streaming sponsor for YouTube Live held recently.

 

Voyeurism?

Users who use the mobile streaming function to do voyeurism or inappropriate activities would have the potential of being banned totally from Qik or even risk losing their phone number. This is because Qik has the access to mobile numbers from the carrier. With the big community base of consumers, there is also a user own reported violation of use like other Web 2.0 platforms.

 

Conclusion

Overall, Qik has an interesting concept and I definitely can’t wait to see how citizen journalism takes place in this Qik realm. *But it certainly is scary at times to think that everything around us can be broadcasted to the whole world within seconds with nothing that sophisticated (just a mobile device)*

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