The Jason Salas Experience

I haven't had a great deal of success with streaming long-form videos, with the clips always inadvertantly cutting out.  I'd capture about 3 minutes of content, only 25 seconds of which ever made it online.  So after being prompted to update to Flash Player 10 after booting up my laptop, I decided to document the experience.

A revelation ensued about exactly how content is streamed - realizing that video continues to be uploaded to the server even after you've stopped recording.

To date I've been connecting to the Qik network and feeding video, after which point I hastily quit the app to tidy up.  Idiot that I am, I naively mistook the status indicator in the right-hand of the screen, thinking the percentage and filesize numbers represented how large the captured clip was on disk (in my case, my Bold's SD card), and not that of an active file transfer.  After seeing the network activity icon stay resident and the percentage increase slowly, I finally got it: Qik's still uploading.

So by closing the program I was kiling my uploads while in transit, hence the truncated clips on my Qik channel.  Duh.  

So in short: don't exit Qik after you've stopped recorded.  Grab a cup of coffee, talk a walk, put the phone down and do something else.  Just let the app do its thing and properly store your stuff online.  (Uploading 9.7MB to Qik took my smartphone about 5 minutes.)

So now I can say with confidence there's good things coming...now that I know what the hell I'm doing.