At yesterday’s launch in London of Edelman’s 2008 Trust Barometer, I did a little experiment with live mobile video that was so easy to do that it’s very clear we’re going to see a great deal more of this.

Take a look at this video – Edelman CEO Richard Edelman delivering the summary findings of his firm’s latest annual report on trust:

(RSS/email subscribers: if you don’t see the embed, the video is here.)

It’s not a particularly remarkable video from a quality point of view. Pixelated, indistinct images, for instance. The sound quality’s not bad, though, and that’s because I was sitting right next to one of the loudspeakers.

You can get a much better audio-visual experience if you watch the video captured on a pretty awesome-looking broadcast-standard TV camera that was the ‘official’ video recording system at the event.

That video is on YouTube.

What I think is remarkable is that the video embedded in this post is a recording of a live video stream shot by someone sitting in the audience (me) with just a mobile phone on a cellular network connection, and which showed Richard presenting in real time, ie, it streamed the video live.

The service I used to do this was Qik (which I wrote about a few days ago).

If you were on the Qik website at the time I was streaming Richard’s speech, you would have seen it at the same time, live, in real time. Just like TV.

It wasn’t only Richard’s presentation I broadcast live over the net. I also did keynoters Patience Wheatcroft and Quentin Letts. Before the event started, I grabbed Edelman’s Simon Collister to explain what the event was all about.

All of this was live, not recorded and then uploaded. And all from a mobile phone, a Nokia N95 8GB in this case.

It’s not that long since the big thing at public events was live blogging, which is evolving rapidly.

Today we have live Twitter text streams which Edelman Europe CEO David Brain and Simon both did.

Now there’s also live streaming video which anyone with a supported mobile phone and a cellular or wifi network connection can do, easily and instantly. I did all my live video streaming with Edelman’s permission, by the way.

So what does this suggest for events in the future?

Well, it suggests that any participant who has a mobile phone with a camera can broadcast your event as it happens.

Imagine a product launch, for instance, or presenting your latest financial results.

You may have live TV there from the mainstream media. You’ll also now have live TV there from the social media.

Take a look at what’s going on at the World Economic Forum in Davos with live mobile video if you want to extend this thought a little.

And what about internal events in your company, behind your firewall?

Think about it. Things aren’t the same any longer.

[Later] Want more evidence that a major shift is beginning to happen? Read what BBC reporter Tim Weber calls interactive television.

Related post:

• The rise of instant mobile video