Once upon a time I used to get paid to do streaming media.  Now I just sit around and pull what little remains of my hair watching the rest of the world “discover” it.  And mostly screw it up, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’m still fascinated by it, and I always will be.  After years of schlepping a big road case and doing hours of setup, it’s pretty amazing that I can stream live video off my cellphone at pretty much the same quality that we were doing back in 1999-2000 when I first started.

So far I’ve installed Qik and UStream on the Droid.  I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the beta of the Droid-optimized client.  I decided to shoot some side-by-side video under convenient, yet truly awful conditions to see how well the encoding and compression holds up.  

Here’s the Qik:

http://qik.ly/q3ej

And here’s the UStream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/from-tom-s-phone

Low light, high contrast and motion.  Pretty much a nightmare scenario.