US:Sac Bee uses mobile technology, streams live video of Olympic torch

Posted by Carolyn Lo on April 11, 2008 at 1:21 PM

The Sacramento Bee has been using Qik, a technology that streams live footage from videophones to a flash player on a website or blog, to broadcast live videos of protests against the Olympic torch procession in San Francisco.

Qik allows reporters to cheaply document an event with more flexibility than a big TV video camera offers. Reporters capture action with a mobile phone, which is then sent to Qik's website where desk staff can download the content and add it to the newspaper's own video player.

"Our goal is to try and create an immediacy for our online video, it's [using Qik) experimental, we have been using it for just the last two weeks," Mark Morris, director of multimedia for the Bee said. "We see it as a way of posting editorial content immediately online, I think we had something posted on our site within 15 minutes of everything being transmitted into Qik."

Citizen journalists have already taken advantage of Qik's technology to give immediate footage of events, a phenomenon called "street journalism." People have been documenting events such as the U.S. presidential elections and Israelis have been using mobile video phones to capture evidence of missiles.

Source: Journalism.co.uk