The latest Newsweek includes a tech piece on a new bit of synergy that may well have opera queen/pirate applications. The idea is that one can attend an event, point and shoot with a video-enabled cellphone, and have the resulting video streamed instantaneously to a website. 

What makes this news is that the technology was used to broadcast last week’s energy policy protest session by Republicans symbolically held in a darkened House chamber after Congress was recessed for summer.  The underlying technology served also to broadcast a portion of a concert by the band Boston, so, in theory at least, a stealthy and secretive opera fan might stream a portion of a sold-out event to a private URL that he has informed his confederates about in advance.

Leading the field in micro video streaming right now is qik.com.  On this site one can sign up to stream cellphone video, view current live video streams, and also peruse archived streams. There’s nothing strictly operatic on the site yet, but here’s a random snippet so you can get an idea of qik’s video and audio quality:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/9iCy9jVKEkg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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