Live webcasting startup Flixwagon announced today that it was testing live “high-quality” video streaming from unlocked iPhones to the web, using Flixwagon’s alpha client.

Here’s Flixwagon’s announcement:

While we don’t condone or recommend unlocking iPhones, as avid iPhone users ourselves we wanted to experiment with ways to enable flixwagon on the iPhone, until the official SDK supports video. We’re going to continue working with the iPhone SDK in the future so we can offer this functionality to all users once video becomes a standard part of the iPhone.

After Flixwagon is installed on the phone, users can broadcast videos with one click to the flixwagon website. Videos can be watched live or saved for later. Also, videos can be embedded in blogs via our flixee widget or uploaded to the user’s YouTube account. Users can also easily determine which of their contacts to share each video with.

We’ll release the iPhone version to our Alpha testers in July. 

Here’s a demo of the Flixwagon iPhone app in action:

It’s a bit of stretch to call this high quality video, but it’s a fun application, with obvious uses for vlogging and video podcasting. 

This is also exactly the type of thing we were hoping for last year, when we published our list of Five Things Apple Needs To Do To Fix The iPhone:

Fix Publishing From The iPhone - many people that buy a $500-600 phone want to not just consume media with the phone, but to create and publish media with it. While Apple’s managed to make listening to tunes, watching videos and surfing the Web easy and useful on the iPhone, it hasn’t made the iPhone a publishing platform. This seems like an opportunity squandered by Apple; they’re already leaders in the area of podcast and video podcast publishing, they’ve got a deal in place with YouTube, and they’ve got their own blog and podcast publishing technologies. Other vendors are turning their phones into mobile video blogging platforms and are passing Apple by.

Flixwagon’s announcement is of a demo of a beta application on a hacked iPhone.

Let’s hope that they get Apple’s support to turn this into a real iPhone app that you can get through the App Store. 

via cnet