Can you help with this video calling project?

Had a note in from an SMS Text News reader, who posed an interesting question.

i have a friend who is going to be in tokyo in the next couple of months… she wants to be able to stream back a couple of hours of LIVE video of her walking around tokyo — basically doing live newscasting from the streets. this needs to be reliable(ish) and cheap… so really we need a solution that becomes internet-delivered as close to source as possible to save on any network charges…. (and needs to be accessible this end via a pc or mac)… obviously a laptop plus 3g card and/or access to a wireless network, plus a videocam would work, but we’re hoping for something more lightweight… an ip-enabled video mobile with flat rate 3g data would be perfect… but being japan there are almost certainly problems with carriers, proprietary data formats, internet gateways/proxies etc… know anyone who knows japanese mobile data inside out and wouldn’t mind a call? there’s really no money in this, but it would be great if we can pull it off!

I suggested 3G to 3G video calling, with something like an N95 with AV out at the other end to turn it into something useful. However, that opens a can of worms of whether it’s actually possible to make a 3G video call from Japan back to the UK.

As the reader says, there’s no real budget in it – but it’s hopefully interesting enough to spark someones interest 🙂