(Clarification Update on the video: The above video was sent in to us – not produced by us. While the source indicates that the devices were both running on 3G, there’s no way for us to positively verify that one wasn’t running WiFi while the other ran on 3G or EDGE.)
With Qik, Kyte, and FlixWagon all battling for their share of the live mobile broadcasting market, is there room for another contender? Ustream.tv seems to think so. We’ve just received word (and even better, video) of a Ustream.tv mobile client already in the works.
While details are still somewhat sparse, we’re hearing that Ustream.tv’s got at least one trick up their sleeve to make their offering stand out: drastically shorter delays in getting your live content onto viewer’s screens.
Currently, competing products in the mobile live streaming market have a delay often reaching times between 30 seconds and a full minute. According to our sources (and as confirmed in the video), Ustream.tv’s solution manages to take the delay down to just a few seconds (6 seconds in the video) when transmitting over a 3G network. It’s not 1:1, but it’s about as close as you get when dealing with the latency of modern wireless data networks.
While no one’s really looking to share the secrets of their methods, we’re being told that Ustream.tv has shifted a good amount of the video transcoding process to the hardware, presumably for maximizing bandwidth and better utilizing free processor time on the handset. That said, we do wonder what the spec requirements for Ustream.tv’s client will be; the video above shows it running on an N95, which totes a 330Mhz processor. While that’s not the utmost top of the line anymore, it’s not exactly entry-level, either.
We’ll dig as deep as we can on this and update as details come in.
Update: A few more details on the application not shown in the video:
- The Ustream application does have chat support.
- If your handset has dual cameras (rear and front) and you press the 5 key on the numberpad, you can switch between the two.
[Thanks for the tip, Captain3]