OpenCourt is a project by WBUR, the Boston University affiliate of National Public Radio, funded by the Knight Foundation to increase knowledge and interaction of the legal process by placing a streaming cameras in courtrooms. A couple of MacBooks Pros, a Canon HD camcorder and Livestream and you have your very own reality television.

"It's a pilot," said John Davidow to Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab. "It's now a reality and off the white board. More and more issues will come forward."

It is more than the equivalent of traffic camera in a courtroom though. Judges have access to the stream from their benches and certain topics, like restraining orders, will not be lived streamed.

The use case is straightforward. Educate the community in the court process, keep people informed of what is happening in their area, increase awareness of how courts work and provide an open and transparent look into the machinations of an important government entity.

It could also be used as a tool for journalists. It was designed by journalists (WBUR is associated with the College of Communications at BU) and the Knight Foundation is a non-profit group with the aim of advancing journalism in the digital era. Live streaming cameras in local courtrooms can help newsrooms stretched thin of reporters. For instance, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger embedded an OpenCourt stream in an article the day after the service launched.

"I'd argue that nothing compares to actually being there and seeing with your own eyes," Davidow said to Ellis. "At the same time, maybe some news organizations would find efficiency in that setup."

Using the Wall

To get started, simply browse to the desired place and click the new Wall tab. Then click on the embedded Brightkite Wall to go full screen. Organizers can even customize the Wall beforehand, if desired. The message and location name can be modified, the shortcode can be selected for use within the U.S. or outside the U.S., and checkins can be turned on or off.

Of course, Brightkite has a much smaller user base than Twitter, which could have made this new feature a non-starter. However, Brightkite has that problem covered. With the Brightkite Wall, anyone can participate by texting a pre-defined shortcode provided for you by the service.

Better Than Live Blogging?

Brightkite's Wall may soon beat Twitter to become the microblogging platform of choice for live events because it offers a much richer stream of information. Instead of just displaying 140-character notes, Brightkite's Wall also displays photos. Combined with notes and checkins, this makes the Wall a much more engaging experience.

For those virtually attending the event, watching the Brightkite Wall could end up being even better than refreshing a blogger's post featuring their "live" coverage of the event. A live blog only gives you one point of view and set of images. Even if it's a group effort, it's not the same as being immediately tapped into the thoughts and reactions of all the event's attendees as you are with Brightkite.

Potential Problems

Our only concern for this new feature is that it doesn't appear to be any sort of administrative control over who can configure what. If some rogue conference attendee wanted to, he or she could highjack the Wall by customizing their own personalized greeting for all to see. That could lead to problems, especially if the message was profane or offensive.

Another concern is that there doesn't seem to be any sort of archiving system in place, so while the Wall may be a great real-time view into the thoughts and activities that are taking place at a particular point in time, going back to view older images and notes could be a challenge if the same locale (address) is used over and over again for subsequent events.

The Wall feature is still in beta, though, so as people begin to use it and submit feedback, it may be updated to even better reflect people's needs than it does now.

Live Streaming Goes Mainstream

The real news here is that mobile live streaming will now be available to a far wider audience than ever before. Qik is clearly positioning as a mass market product as well, while some of its competitors like Kyte have specifically shied away from going after this market and, so far, only support high-end Nokia S60 phones.

Now that Qik is becoming available to a larger and more diverse audience, it will be interesting to see if we will also see new ways of using it, as well as new controversies around the privacy and copyright implications of live streaming. Hopefully, Qik's competitors, including Kyte and Flixwagon will soon follow suit and release their software for mainstream phones as well.

If you are wondering about the video quality of these live streams, here is a demo from Qik:

Mobile carriers have invested heavily in building out their 3G infrastructures and they now are in need of recouping those costs. By offering compelling applications and services that take advantage of the increased bandwidth, they have the opportunity to generate additional data revenue. A livestreaming application such as Flixwagon certainly fills that need.

The new platform will allow mobile carriers the ability to create a customizable version of the Flixwagon mobile app where additional features unique to the carriers' handsets and mobile software could be added.

The livestreams created by the Flixwagon users can then be streamed to the web, either on the Flixwagon site itself or onto a proprietary web site owned and operated by the mobile carriers themselves. Users can set privacy controls within the app, allowing their streams to either be public or private. They can create groups of friends and family for private streams, which they can configure in the app's settings.

The Platform For Media Organizations

After a Flixwagon livestream ends, the video is made available for later viewing. This makes the offering ideal for news organizations who want to incorporate footage from citizen journalists into their web sites or feature older footage in their broadcasts.

MTV has worked with Flixwagon in the past on a number of endeavors, including three 30-minute livestreams from backstage at a Jonas Brothers concert. Those videos alone hit the Flixwagon site with a total of 6 million streams over the course of one weekend. They also worked with MTV to stream political coverage as a part of the "Choose or Lose" campaign. For this, Flixwagon helped in getting live footage from the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, as well as exclusive videos filmed back on Super Tuesday, 2008.

VP Candidate Sarah Palin in an MTV interview via Flixwagon, Super Tuesday

Although the company is not announcing partners at this time, VP and co-founder, Sarig Reichert, hinted that there is already interest from a couple of carriers both here in the U.S. and in Latin America.

At the moment, the Flixwagon service supports Nokia devices and the iPhone (via an app for jailbroken phones). However, they will be adding support for additional platforms such as Java-enabled phones in the near future.

We'd like to warn all of our readers that jailbreaking your iPhone is not illegal, however it does void your warranty with Apple.

Today on the Qik Blog, Qik announced support for jailbroken iPhones running the 2.0 iPhone OS firmware. According to their post, users can expect regular updates to come through the pipeline as the days wear on. While the settings for Qik are minimal and unsatisfying at the moment, the interface for the Qik app is awesome. Unlike the Qik app for the Motorola Q, you cannot set tittles and descriptions via the Qik app on the iPhone.

Qik developers recommend using 3G or WIFI when livestreaming from the Qik app. Unfortunately, EDGE is just too slow.

Flixwagon Launches on the iPhone

While Flixwagon's registration and setup is a lot easier than Qik's, I'm not a fan of the interface. Where Qik takes advantage of the iPhone's entire screen estate, Flixwagon ops for a square box. After doing a quick test of the app, video quality is pretty decent and certainly on par with video quality from my Motorola Q9c on Qik.You can also edit titles and descriptions directly from the app.

Start Livestreaming From Your iPhone

We'd like to warn all of our readers that jailbreaking your iPhone is not illegal, however it does void your warranty with Apple.

To get Qik and Flixwagon on your jailbroken iPhone you first need to jailbreak your iPhone. Their are two programs available for jailbreaking your iPhone:

• Pwnage for Mac users


• WinPwn for Windows users