Qik

» see qik.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Qik started in a garage in 2006 and its whole argument was one word: now. Other video sites took an upload and gave you a link an hour later. Qik took the camera feed off a phone and put it on a web page while the phone was still pointed at the thing. Ramu Sunkara and Bhaskar Roy built it with Nikolay Abkairov, out of Redwood City with a second office in Zelenograd, outside Moscow.

The alpha went out in December 2007 and the public beta in July 2008, and the reach it got early came from phones nobody thinks of as video devices now. Qik ran on Nokia S60 handsets and on Sony Ericsson models, sold a premium build through the Ovi Store, and got its first real audience from Robert Scoble pointing a Nokia at whatever was in front of him. Money followed: $3 million in April 2008 from a group including Marc Benioff, an undisclosed round that September from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, then $5.5 million in mid-2009.

By January 2010 Qik had 600,000 users. By that December it had five million, which is the kind of curve that gets a company bought rather than beaten. Skype announced the acquisition on 6 January 2011, and the price, undisclosed at the time, turned out to be $150 million. Microsoft bought Skype four months after that.

The hardware for this was everywhere around me. Symbian Nokias were what Turkey carried in 2008 and Qik ran on them. What was not there was the data plan. Live video off a handset meant paying by the megabyte on a metered mobile connection, and that arithmetic ended the idea before the software got a chance to be interesting. This one goes on the short list of products I understood completely and never once opened.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The hard problem Qik solved was not the streaming, it was the network underneath it. A phone on a 2008 cell connection has bandwidth that changes every few seconds and disappears entirely in elevators. Qik's encoder adapted to that on the fly and kept the stream alive at whatever quality was left, which is ordinary now and was not then. The company held patents on that part.

The rest of the product was a website where your streams landed with a comment box under them. People used it for the obvious things and for one less obvious thing: a stream that is already on a server cannot be deleted off the phone. That made Qik briefly popular with people recording traffic stops and demonstrations, a use case the founders did not design for and every phone camera has inherited.

~ the skype years ~

Skype spent $150 million and then did very little visible with it. Qik kept running as its own app under new ownership while video messaging got folded into Skype proper, and the standalone service was left where it stood. On 20 March 2014 Skype gave thirty days notice. The apps stopped working on 30 April and the shared videos stopped resolving the same day.

Six months after killing it, Microsoft put the name back on something else. Skype Qik launched on 14 October 2014 as a short video messaging app with no relationship to live streaming at all, and it lasted seventeen months before being retired on 24 March 2016. The brand outlived the product by two years and was doing a different job the whole time.

~ what it was early to ~

Everything Qik did in 2008 shipped again later with more money behind it. Meerkat and Periscope arrived in 2015 and got treated as an invention. Facebook Live followed, and then every other place that now has a button for it. The difference was not the engineering. It was that by 2015 a phone had a front camera worth using and a data plan that did not punish you for using it.

Qik's own ending is the smaller story. A company bought its patents, absorbed its engineers, and let the thing that made the patents interesting stop answering. The five million accounts were not the asset, which was clear from the price and clearer from what happened next.

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