Jackie Danicki

I’ve been having fun with Qik, but was frustrated and puzzled by the fact that other people seemed able to stream smoothly and with little to no lag. My streams were lagged to hell. This meant that the live chat element - where people on your video’s page type you messages that come up on your phone’s screen, so you can converse during the live stream - eluded me.

Then, tonight, Pat Phelan sent me a Twitter DM before he hit the hay over in Ireland, saying, “also don’t forget you can switch camera to back, you can see comments as they come in and respond”. Huh? Switch camera to back?

Turns out the N95 has two cameras. (That’s what I get for never reading manuals.)

This was after Pat and Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy had helped me troubleshoot my connection problems. Turns out that running Qik via wifi makes for a smoother, faster, drastically less lagged stream than running over your cell provider.

So this was my first time testing out what Pat had told me, and people from Australia, Singapore, and who knows where else turned up to chat with me (the chat remarks are archived as comments). I didn’t announce that I was doing a live stream or anything, I just planned to pop on for thirty seconds and test out the new camera configuration. The possibilities for this live streaming stuff are REALLY exciting me right now.

(No, I don’t stay sideways for long.)

Filed under: Life