Last week we reported that Next2Friends had come out with what appeared to be the first application for the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl handsets to stream live video to the Web, in a similar fashion to early players like Qik, Flixwagon, and Kyte. That’s pretty interesting because till now the BlackBerry has been a bit like the PC guy in those Mac ads – a little dorky, without those cool new web apps.
So far mobile video streaming has been largely relegated to Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and jailbroken iPhones. [Update: It’s worth noting that Qik now supports the Motorola Q Series phones, a J2ME platform which is pretty mainstream 5 months ago, as well as several mass market SE and Nokia handsets]. Now the startup has also come up with a streaming video app for the new BlackBerry Bold smartphone which may drag Crackberry users away from their email for once. Video is streamed live to the user’s account which has links and embeds. Next2Friends also supports Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and Samsung.
However, outside of the Blackberry market, it’s going to be more interesting when they release their application for the Motorola Razr next Monday. The Razr is one if the biggest selling phones in the US, and was a hot seller for a while in Europe. If video streaming hits those lower-end phones then the whole concept will seriously mainstream the activity far quicker than creating an app for high end phones.