I'm really looking forward seeing how this app is used to live broadcast interactions with police. Confiscating a phone and deleting it's contents will no longer be such a hot option.
And, anything streamed can't be confiscated. You aren't obligated to show a police officer anything not physically on your phone if they're arresting you.
They might have to do some work to become resistant to takedowns, but that's a very long-term deal. Just getting the content off the phone is good for the short term.
This seems like it has the potential to replace a great deal of what "news" does for us now. We can literally see what is happening, when it is happening, with no editing.
Building on fire? 10 phones point at it.
Major disaster? 10 more phones.
Amusing thing, anywhere? 10 phones, and it's archived for anyone to watch later.
I did exactly the same thing in 2008 for the Google Android Challenge. After starting the app, you would see two big buttons - browse and stream - and clicking on stream would automatically start, well, recording and streaming video. Only after you were done you were required to enter a description and optionally a category (concert, hot event, journalism, sightseeing, etc) of the video you just shot.
Everything would be geotagged and browsable by category, description and radius. Say you wanted to check out the clubs in a 1km radius - just filter by that criteria and see where the hot party is. There is some protest going on right now and you want to see what is happening? Check it out in real time. You are late for a concert and don't wanna miss out? Just watch one of the 50 streams being recorded live. Want to see how war really looks like? You can.
There was a gmaps overlay and some other features I don't remember anymore.
Anyways, I didn't get sponsored (the best 100 or so apps got $25k), and with 10 other competing live streaming services I kinda scrapped the project. Fun to see how history repeats itself, although I thought this was already a solved problem. Maybe I should have pressed on back then :)
There's kind of this race to be the first popular streaming video service.
I've been working on something myself this past summer for Android. The difficulty is that you have to create something that can stream video at a high quality despite a poor connection. People will tolerate compression artifacts in a live stream, but on replay the video should be full quality. I think I've come up to a solution for this, but I've had to dig through a bunch of compression research papers.
Of course, if my little hobby ever takes off at some point I don't know what I'll do -- without a good way to monetize quickly, there's no way I can afford the bandwidth of streaming video.
I'm working on something similar and we are looking for an Android dev to lead the Android implementation. Would you be interested in having a brief phone call? My contact info is in my profile.
Here's a link to the YC FAQ where they talk about competition: http://ycombinator.com/faq.html. That said, I don't think we're a competitor to Justin.tv's live streaming app. We're angling toward fastest video possible, rather than live video that gets recorded.
The Geo and citizen journalism angle I think makes these guys really unique. Also, its just really really fast and easy to start streaming. When it is that easy, you start living streaming everything.
That's what I like, even they originally pitched as a way to stream for conferences (including a very weirdly streamed TEDx conference), what they've built is the best streaming tool out there for one to many.
David, Tyler, Paul, and Vu have built something awesome that allows anyone to create. I already know people who can't stop using it. I just wonder what happens once it explodes...
The geographic aspect of Tapin is one of the things that I like the most. It makes finding video relevant to me so much easier, and it's something I really haven't seen in other sharing contexts. I'm pretty excited for Tapin.tv
I remember using Qik[1] on my Nokia N97 a few years ago and thinking the idea was awesome. Without wifi or bundled data packages it was kind of expensive, obviously not an issue anymore.
"With today’s generation of on-demand mobile video apps, users also have the option of adding filters, title cards, and other crap before posting video." (Ryan Lawler, Author)
A few differences. We have sound, unlimited video length and have a much heavier focus on content creation. The current app is entirely for content creation while the web end is consumption.
Take a look at the TLD and you'll find your answer. Whether it's positive or negative, I don't know -- but here it's their ball and thus their ballgame.
One of the first thing pg tells everyone in YC is that YC founders aren't treated any differently by the Hacker News software and moderators.
A lot of the upvotes come from the fact that people share TechCrunch stories with everyone they know. There seems to be a big feedback loop effect with TechCrunch.
