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As we first reported last night, Apple is finally allowing live streaming video applications into the App Store. Apple’s acceptance of the Ustream Live Broadcaster has seemingly paved the way for other live-streaming apps. And one of the best known ones, Qik, is wasting little time to get its app out there. The company writes in a blog post today that they’ve already submitted their app for approval.

I’ve actually had the Qik live-streaming app on my iPhone for a while, thanks to the magic of ad-hoc distribution. Unfortunately, Apple’s policies restrict the number of copies Qik can send this way, so the application remained mostly a proof-of-concept for most people. Given how quickly Qik submitted the app to the store, we expect the official build that will likely get approved to be the same one we have been using, which we reviewed here. It’s solid, but the video quality leaves a little to be desired compared to some competing video apps (none of which did live streaming).

Like Ustream, Qik did release a version of its app that allowed users to upload videos — but not live videos, until now.

Following Ustream and Qik, you can probably expect other companies like 12seconds to get into the iPhone live streaming game as well. Once all these apps are available, the question is how much will people use them? Services like Qik in particular seemed hot among some of the tech elite last year, but this year have seemed to have large cooled off. Perhaps that’s because people have been ditching their Nokia phones (it seemed like everyone was using the N95 with Qik for a while) in favor of devices like the iPhone. Now that these apps are allowed on the iPhone, will we see a resurgence of links to live streams on Twitter again?

Below find some examples of Qik videos I shot with my iPhone 3GS using the ad-hoc version of the app.

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Kyte has just released its new Mobile Producer app into the App Store [iTunes link]. While it doesn’t require you have an iPhone 3GS, if you want to take advantage of its best feature, video, then you must have one. And if you do, I think you’ll be pretty pleased with how well it works.

The app, which is $4.99, is very simple. You boot it up, log in (or create a new account), and you’re taken to a screen where you put in a title for your “show” (what you’re about to broadcast). Below that are links to add video, a photo, and/or a link. If you choose to add a video you can easily take a new video, or use one you’ve already shot with your iPhone 3GS. The video capture functionality is fast and works just as well as the iPhone’s own video capturing app.

But the real killer features of the Kyte app are its upload speed and even more so, the quality of its videos. While I’ve already gone in depth about why I think video is the killer feature for the iPhone 3GS, based mainly on how well the videos shot on the device look, and how easily they are uploaded to YouTube. But in testing this app out today, I’d say that Kyte’s offering is at least as compelling from an ease-of-use perspective. The video upload was about as speedy as it was to YouTube, but it didn’t feature the annoying rendering time of the YouTube videos I’ve uploaded. And the video quality is noticeably better on Kyte than on YouTube when uploaded from the iPhone 3GS (see below).

One downside to recording the videos in the Kyte app is that they don’t save to your video library on the phone. The other downside is the price: As I mentioned, $4.99. But that’s to make it clear that Kyte is intending this app for its commercial publishers, we’re told. But any Kyte users is able to use it and really, $4.99 isn’t a bad price for a video app that works this well.

This offering is the latest in Kyte’s mobile strategy with regards to the iPhone. Last month, it rolled out a series of branded iPhone apps. Of course, as a live-streaming service, Kyte would love to be able to live-stream from the iPhone 3GS, but that’s still not allowed yet. Hopefully that will change one day.

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Yesterday, we told you about Posterous’ attempt to take over the blogosphere with their new import option. Now they’re back with bigger and better news: support for email uploads for iPhone 3G S videos to practically any social site, including Twitter and Facebook.

Posterous is already a great distributor of your content since you can auto-tweet and post to a variety of other sites. So, with support for iPhone 3G S videos, Posterous is not only taking on TwitPic, but they’re also positioning themselves as a video for any platform service.

You can now share video with Posterous, and any additional site configured for auto-posting, simply by emailing your video to the appropriate Posterous email address. You can even shoot in whatever mode you’d like – landscape or standard – and not have to worry about how the video will be oriented on the web. Just click share on the video and email away to post everywhere (post@posterous,com), or just to specific services (for example, twitter@posterous.com).

Technically you could post video to Posterous via email previously, but they ramped up their support for iPhone videos to automatically render them properly, regardless of whether or not you shoot in landscape mood (trust me, this is fantastic and not supported by many other services), in a flash player that’s appropriate for the video. They’ve also increased overall video quality and updated the service to support the 3g2 and amr mobile formats for audio.

A few bonuses of using Posterous from your iPhone 3G S include the ability to download your video files (a standard feature of the service), video upload by email even when you’re not connected to a WiFi network (a huge shortcoming of other apps), and audio posting to Posterous using the native Voice Memos app.

Basically, Posterous provides the most convenient way to post video from your new iPhone and distribute it to your respective social sites that we’ve seen so far.

See Also: Top 5 Ways to Post Video to Twitter

Tags: iphone, iphone 3g s, posterous, twitter, video, video sharing