Flickr Adds Video Capabilities to Service

EMNDev writes "Flickr has announced they're adding video playback capabilities to the popular photo service. Clips are limited to 90 seconds and 150mb, what they're calling 'long photos' as they refer to them. 'Unlike YouTube, where videos from professional media and amateurs alike are uploaded for the world to view, Flickr members can limit who the videos are shared with, through privacy settings. Sharing digital photographs online is now commonplace, with Flickr users having uploaded 2bn worldwide. However, video sharing is less lucrative, with 55% of internet users just playing their video clips on their cameras or on their PCs - without sharing the footage over the internet.'"

Privacy Settings are available on YouTube...

Right on the Upload page there's a "Broadcast Options" section where you can mark a video public, or make it private and allow up to 25 friends to view the video.

Not exactly a flexible option, but it contradicts the article in a pretty major way.

Youtube and Blogger

On top of which, Blogger (owned by Google) uses the Youtube service and allows for completely private (to your website) video viewing without a "25 friend" limit

we already have youtube

In my opinion, there's a pretty big difference between photography and videography.

I think a lot of people that post to Flickr try to create art with their cameras. I know there are many many people that share family and vacation photos too but there is a lot of high quality work on there as well and that's one of the reasons I love Flickr.

Videos... well, I haven't seen too much art created by a member of the masses with a video camera. I see people causing all sorts of harm to themselves in online videos. I see a lot of cute/stupid/weird things.

I think it would be great if there was a push to get artsy videos published online. I just don't think a lot of people are capable or willing to do it.

Re:we already have youtube

"I think it would be great if there was a push to get artsy videos published online."

At 320x240, 15fps there is little incentive to produce or pleasure in enjoying art in video, IMHO. But I guess that's where the creativity resides.

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???

Where do you get those specs? I couldn't find anything in the FAQ [flickr.com]....

Re:we already have youtube

There are already plenty [flickr.com] of [flickr.com] examples [flickr.com] of [flickr.com] artsy [flickr.com] videos [flickr.com] on [flickr.com] flickr [flickr.com].

No reason to think it won't keep up.

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> Videos... well, I haven't seen too much art created by a member of the masses with a video camera. I see people causing all sorts of harm to themselves in online videos. I see a lot of cute/stupid/weird things.

If you want to see zero budget video came

Tomorrow's headline: Flickr and ISPs Clash ...

Flickr and ISPs Clash over new Video Capabilities http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/09/1652257 [slashdot.org]

Convergence isn't always a good thing.

With all the technological convergence (Cell phones that have cameras, that are caledars, that are web browsers), it makes sense that software will follow.

The only problem, is that convergence is only beneficial if it is implemented well. If I had the c

Unlike youtube?

Unlike YouTube, where videos from professional media and amateurs alike are uploaded for the world to view, Flickr members can limit who the videos are shared with, through privacy settings

I guess I must be hallucinating the privacy settings on my videos,

At least until MS buys yahoo ...

I fully expect all of the utility of my Flickr Pro membership to be completely destroyed if and when Microsoft buys Yahoo.

They'll invariably migrate it to Active X or Silverlight or somesuch Microsoft technology, make it twice as slow and cost twice as much, and make it tied to a passport login -- it would likely only play Windows Media files. The usual Microsoft strategy when they acquire a service.

I'm really hoping Flickr wouldn't get mangled in that acquisition. I really like it, and I've already got a lot of photos uploaded and the like.

Sadly, I don't expect to be pleasantly surprised should it happen. :(

Cheers

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Dammit! I had to sign up for Yahoo when Yahoo took over flickr. Now are we going to have to get an msn or live account? I'm willing to bet that flickr is a big big reason that MS wants yahoo. There was a huge revolt amongst the users that had been with

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Dammit! I had to sign up for Yahoo when Yahoo took over flickr. Now are we going to have to get an msn or live account?

Well, I would have to say that Microsoft has never hesitated to buy a service and migrate everyone to their stuff. Be it hotmail, passpo

Yahoo Video

So let me get this straight. Yahoo bought Flickr. Yahoo merged their Yahoo Photos service into Flickr because it was already popular and people preferred it. Now, Yahoo is adding video to Flickr... but they still run a competing service called Yahoo Video. I presume they hope Flickr's popularity will rub off on video too and create a competitor to Youtube?

Is anyone else sick of all these walled garden Web services? Wouldn't it be great if all the competing services would interoperate and then you could view anything from your choice of Web service, depending upon which interface you liked best? Some days it seems like Web 2.0 is just a step backwards to the internet of yore.

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It would be even better if we could all just run our own damned servers at home, and not worry about having to shackle ourselves to someone's server farm in a far off corner of the world.

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Yeah, let's all generate our own electricity and bake bread.

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Mmmmmm...home-baked bread.

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So let me get this straight. Yahoo bought Flickr. Yahoo merged their Yahoo Photos service into Flickr because it was already popular and people preferred it. Now, Yahoo is adding video to Flickr... but they still run a competing service called Yahoo Video.

Why is this exciting?

"Unlike YouTube, where videos from professional media and amateurs alike are uploaded for the world to view, Flickr members can limit who the videos are shared with, through privacy settings."

YouTube's broadcast settings allow limited distribution as well. Up to 25 people can be added to a whitelist of viewers. Flickr and YouTube differ a tiny bit here on how privacy restrictions are implemented, but for 99% of use cases they have competitive parity.

The more significant difference would be that Flickr is going to allow 10x file sizes over YouTube. This allows for much greater control over the resolution quality, and hence will be much more attractive to "artistic" use.

More generally, though, this would seem to be yet another case of old-becomes-new-again. iFilm.com (now spike.com) has been running a similar service for over 10 years now. Perhaps there are significant differences in their terms of service? Perhaps the combination of still images plus moving pictures is some huge new convergence previously overlooked? Perhaps the brand recognition of Flickr will make this more successful than iFilm has been?

In the absence of answers to these questions, my snap judgement of this announcement is "ho hum".

A Decade of Progress

If people had told me 10 years ago that this was about as far as we'd get with the internet in a decade, I really wouldn't have believed them. As much as I hear about all the huge advances in technology, I always ponder the 320x240 pixelated screens of YouTube and remember that it's what people consider 10 years more advanced than what we had in 1998. And in 1998 we had VRML with people announcing that we were on the verge of the internet being a 3-Dimensional landscape. We also had 320x240 pixelated video, but I thought that was just temporary. I remember watching South Park on RealPlayer G2. Now instead of it being an application, it's even more pixelated and embedded directly in a web page, just in case downloading content was too convenient. Flickr's progress has been to strip down the size and length of videos. I can't wait for 2050. By then, we'll have reduced clips down to 3 seconds that you can only watch in a 16x16 thumbnail. And as the "Web M" Trend (It won't be hip to use numbers anymore for internet "versions"), all the coolest companies won't have any vowels at all. Hooray progress!

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Well, from TFA:

Only Flickr premium users will be able to upload videos to the service, which limits video upload on Flickr to the service's most active users.

Here [flickr.com] is a Pro account (that I randomly ran across - apologies to the owner for unwanted attentio

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(hate replying to self, but...)

Here you go:

Flickr Videos in use [flickr.com]

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There are several examples linked from this flickr blog post: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/04/09/video-on-flickr-2/ [flickr.net].

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After reading through the FAQ [flickr.com], here's the GP's answer:

Go to "Advanced Search" [flickr.com], then set "Search by media type" to "Only videos"

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Based on the context, stats given, I think the submitter meant prevalent.