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Veeker Makes Video Instant Messaging a Reality
Stitch_Surfs writes to tell us that the new video instant messaging tool "Veeker" went live today. Able to be embedded in any website, Veeker allows you to share mobile video with your friends. From the article: "In a nutshell, Veeker is instant video messaging. The most basic use case is to shoot 60 seconds of video from your mobile phone and upload this video to Veeker in the form of an MMS. Within about 60 seconds your video is on the Veeker portal where, depending upon whether you sent it to one of three addresses is visible only by you (me@veeker.com) visible to you and your contacts (v@veeker.com) or made available for viewing by anyone who visits Veeker and is inclined to check you out (world@veeker.com)."
This whole thing sounds confusing. Could someone send me a video showing how its done?
Have you read my journal today?
... Video messaging rates are rediculous. Maybe if one could send the video via a non-phone SMS service, things might look hopeful.
Interesting concept however.
First off, the title to this story is a bit misleading. Video IM has been around for a long time. This is significant because it's mobile video IM. Second, who is actually going to use this? All it is is an automated way to host video content sent via MMS, something that is pretty trivial to do yourself anyway. How many people really want to record themselves on their cell phone and pay to send it to Veeker so they can... Call someone and tell them the URL to visit to see it? If I want to send video to someone, I can already MMS it to them directly. If I want to update the world on my status, there are ways to update various types of blogs via MMS as well. If I really, really need to be able to upload my little clips of cell phone video to an HTTP server, I'll use my own and write a script to do it for free.
For extremely large values of 'instant'.
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Don't the cellphone companies already have convenient ways for people to send video voicemails to each other? Not that their systems would do everything this new company is doing, but it would be a good way to judge demand... which apparently isn't very high.
As near as I can tell, this offering does not replicate the functionality of the cell phone companies, but relies upon it. It looks like you use your service to send a short video to this company and they post it to a Website for you and let you manage who can access that site. Only people who make an account can view the videos, so it will never go anywhere.
Er...maybe I'm reading this wrong, but how the hell is this "video IM"? Instant messenging I think of as me and someone else simultaneously interacting....I type while he types, and we get each other's stuff in real time. This doesn't sound like that. This sounds like a pastebin; I upload my 60 secs and anybody can go look at it. Which I guess is ok....but it's certainly not as handy as actual IM functionality would be.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.