Skype Qik

The live phone-video pioneer Skype paid $150 million for, shut down, relaunched as a messaging app, and shut down again

Acquired & killed
19902026

Qik was a Silicon Valley service, founded in 2006 by Ramu Sunkara, Bhaskar Roy and Nikolay Abkairov, that let you stream live video from an ordinary phone to the web, years before Periscope. In alpha from December 2007 and public beta from July 2008, it worked on more than 140 handsets. Skype bought it in January 2011 for $150 million, closed the original service in April 2014, launched a video messaging app called Skype Qik in October 2014, and shut that down on 24 March 2016.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2007
  2. December 2007 Launch
    Qik alpha

    Live video from a phone to the web.

  3. 2008
  4. July 2008 Launch
    Public beta

    More than 140 supported handsets.

  5. 2011
  6. 6 January 2011 Acquisition
    Skype buys Qik

    A reported $150 million.

  7. 2014
  8. 30 April 2014 Shutdown
    The original Qik service closes
  9. 14 October 2014 Revival
    Skype Qik launches

    A group video messaging app with the old name.

  10. 2016
  11. 22 February 2016 Shutdown announced
    Microsoft announces the retirement

    Low usage.

  12. 24 March 2016 Shutdown
    Skype Qik switched off

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: qik.com, 1 June 2009 →

Browse qik.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2016 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Qik, Inc. 2006–2011 Founded Ramu Sunkara, Bhaskar Roy and Nikolay Abkairov, Redwood City
Skype 2011–2011 Acquisition Bought for $150 million at CES 2011
Microsoft 2011–2016 Acquisition Owner of Skype; closed Qik in 2014 and Skype Qik in 2016

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Skype bought Qik in January 2011 for $150 million, closed the original live-streaming service on 30 April 2014, relaunched the name that October as Skype Qik, a video messaging app, and retired that too on 24 March 2016, citing low usage. Its features were folded into Skype itself.

Our analysis: Qik was years too early twice. Streaming live video from a phone in 2008 was genuinely new; it ran on Nokias and Windows Mobile handsets before the iPhone could shoot video at all, and the technology was good enough that Skype paid $150 million mostly to get it. Inside Skype, and then inside Microsoft, the product itself stopped mattering: the streaming service was wound down just as Periscope and Meerkat were about to prove the idea, and the Skype Qik messaging app of 2014 was one more entrant in a market Snapchat had already won. Both shutdowns were rational and both threw away a head start.

History [edit]

Live from a Nokia

Qik was founded in 2006 in Redwood City, with an engineering office in Zelenograd outside Moscow. Its trick was making a 2007 phone do something phones did not do: press record and the video went out live to qik.com, where anyone could watch and chat, and the recording was saved and shareable to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and a dozen other services. The alpha started in December 2007, the public beta in July 2008, and the supported-device list grew past 140 handsets. Investors included Marc Benioff, and after the beta launch Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz came in as advisers. Journalists streamed protests on it; early lifecasters ran their days through it. Two-way video calling on phones followed.

Bought by Skype, ended by Microsoft

On 6 January 2011, at CES, Skype announced it was buying Qik for a reported $150 million, weeks before Microsoft bought Skype itself. The team and technology went into Skype\'s mobile video work. The original streaming service was told in March 2014 that it would close, and on 30 April 2014 qik.com stopped. That October Skype reused the name for Skype Qik, a lightweight group video messaging app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone: forty-two-second clips, no accounts beyond a phone number, messages that faded after two weeks. It was clean, late, and unnecessary next to Snapchat, and on 22 February 2016 Microsoft announced it would be retired on 24 March 2016, with its features absorbed into Skype.

Meerkat and Periscope launched the year after the original Qik died, and live phone video became one of the defining formats of the decade, without the company that did it first.

The domain today

qik.com belongs to an unrelated company.

Similar projects

Wunderlist The to-do app Microsoft bought to bury 2010–2020 Google Goggles Point your phone at a landmark, a book or a wine label and Google told you what it was, eight years before Lens replaced it 2009–2018 Gowalla The prettier check-in app from Austin that lost the SXSW war to Foursquare, was bought by Facebook for its team and switched off three months later 2009–2012 Readmill The Berlin e-book reader that put your highlights in the margin for other people to see, bought by Dropbox for its team and closed within three months 2011–2014 Astrid The to-do app with the friendly squid, four million users, bought by Yahoo and closed 96 days later 2008–2013 Color Forty-one million dollars before launch, an app nobody understood, and a shutdown within two years: the cautionary tale of the 2011 app boom 2011–2012

Sources [edit]

  1. Skype Qik Wikipedia 1 January 2024
  2. Confirmed: Skype buys mobile video startup Qik TechCrunch 6 January 2011
  3. qik.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 June 2009

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).