The mobile video broadcasting space is home to a pretty interesting fight right now. Ok, maybe fight isn’t the best choice of words, or perhaps it is. There are a few big boys when it comes to live interactive video feeds streaming from a mobile handset and they are continuously trying to outdo each other. Qik has the buzz generated by many high-profile celwebrity users, Kyte is the new kid on the block entering the space with an already-substantial user base from their existing web service, and Flixwagon is the well-funded video quality leader with an exciting feature set. With the latter, things just got a whole lot more interesting as Flixwagon has just announced a new client version that brings with it a host of functionality that its competitors will surely be interested in. Take a look:
- Share on Twitter and YouTube directly from phone: you can share individual videos on twitter and YouTube directly from your device, as well as customize the message or titles. All you need to do is add your Twitter or YouTube account details on Flixwagon.com, and then you can customize posts directly from your phone.
- Detailed sharing from device: on your device you can now easily choose which specific groups (friends, family, etc.) can access your video. Make sure you set up your contacts, groups, and alerts first on flixwagon.com and you can start sharing flix with them on the fly.
- Digital zoom-in and zoom-out.
- Post messages back to chat. You can send IM messages back to the video chat room, making chats around your video 2-way. This is especially useful when you want to respond to your viewers’ comments without interrupting the video or audio in the broadcast.
- Change title: you can now change the video title directly from the phone while broadcasting. This is great when the ‘right’ headline comes to you while you broadcast (and can help more viewers discover your broadcast while you’re still broadcasting live).
- Choose between delay or video quality: in the preferences section you can determine whether your broadcasts will be optimized for the shortest delay, or highest video quality.
Whew! The two things of particular interest to us are digital zoom and the ability to chat while broadcasting. There are plenty of times while streaming event coverage, observation etc where typing a response to an on-screen comment is much more appropriate than speaking a response. Flixwagon also announced a few tweaks to the website such as RSS feeds that help round off this round of improvements. Definitely worth looking into.
