Mobile video's star is rising

Live video broadcasts of daily events — the baby's first yawn, celebrity-spotting at the mall — are increasingly being sent via mobile phones, in a trend that some call the beginning of the end for standalone text and picture-only messages.

"Just typing in what you are doing is no longer enough," an analyst at the Guidewire Group told the New York Times.

Mobile video-sharing is simple, she added, and doesn't require television cameras or satellite links. Users just point and shoot with their phone's built-in camera, press a few buttons to send it to a blog or microblog (i.e. Twitter), social networking site, or to the website of a streaming video service like Kyte or Qik. Both programs enable users to share videos from their mobile units and could, to a degree, expedite the trend.

Qik, however, currently only works with certain phones on the Windows Mobile OS, such as the Motorola Q, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, AT&T Tilt, Samsung Blackjack II, and the HTC Touch Dual. (HTC will introduce an Android-supported phone later this year, but it is unknown whether the Android system will support video streaming.)

And while individuals aren't charged to use Kyte, commercial users — like news stations could would use the mobile video to capture news events in real-time — pay a traffic-based fee or fork over a share of revenue.

Other obstacles that might stand in the way of footloose, fancy-free adoption:

• Phones must be equipped with live video-streaming capabilities for which users generally must pay: Nokia's N series of smartphones, for example, cost between $400 and $895. And getting iPhones to mack out the feature is, well, complicated at the very least.
• Video files are heavy, so a phone plan with unlimited internet data streaming is a must. (This costs about $15 to $20 a month on most carriers.)
• Video quality will vary, depending on how much bandwidth is available from the mobile provider at a given time or place.

One key benefit, however, is the interactive nature of video. Once sent to a website like Qik or Kyte, viewers can instantly respond with typed messages sent back to mobile phones, or in a live session.

The MobileASL project, meanwhile, hopes to use "video texting" to implement the hearing-impaird. The University of Washington-based project uses algorithms that focus on critical moving parts (hands and fingers) to compress sign-language videos so that they can be sent across limited-bandwidth telcom lines, reports Scientific American.