Qik today announced, via its blog, that it is making Qik Premium available for select Nokia devices through the Ovi Store. Qik is an application / service allows you to stream video live from your smartphone to the web. Advantages of the premium version include improved processing on uploaded videos (higher quality play back and improved speed on low bandwidth connections), unlimited storage space and the ability to download videos (that you have uploaded to Qik) to your PC.

Qik Premium running on the N97 mini

Qik is promoting the ability to download videos as allowing you to add your Qik videos to your media collection, so that you can, for example, burn them to a CD. Qik say they will be adding additional premium features later in the year and that these will be made available to those who download the premium version now. One of the upcoming premium features will be the ability to upload pre-recorded videos to Qik (e.g. videos shot by the phone's camera application).

The Qik Premium version has an introductory price of $4.99 (for a year), which will be available until the end of March. It is available exclusively via Nokia's Ovi Store. You can find it via search, this direct link (mobile) or by looking in the 'Recommended' channel in Ovi Store. This is the first mobile version of Qik's Premium product.

The most obvious and immediate differences is that videos uploaded via a premium client have a higher quality version available for playback. When playing 'premium-client-recorded' videos on the Qik site you are given the option to watch a 'HQ' version of the video. Here is an example video provided by Qik.

Standard Qik video compared to Qik premium (HD quality) on the right. The full video is embedded below.