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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.'"
How are we supposed to get an idea of what people are using the capability for if we can't find any native users?
--Mike--
"Clips are limited to 90 seconds and 150mb..."
I guess my 1080/30p photoplays are out of the question then?
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.'"
Lucrative for whom?
/Ryan used me as an object.
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.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
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.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Flickr and ISPs Clash over new Video Capabilities http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/09/1652257
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 choice between a site that will do everything (but only at a mediocre level) and being forced to use multiple sites that are all excellent... I'd choose the excellent sites.
I know not everyone feels this way - but one stop shopping works well for walmart, but not so much for shoppers drug mart (for example). And havn't we all had gadgets that suck simply because they try to do too much?
My fear is that flickr will soon fall prey to the same problems - it'll be okay, but no longer good at what it does.
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, then? Amazingly effective hallucination, since it works properly.
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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Flickr has much better permission settings than Youtube, so that's definately a bonus, but 90 sec[eot] (Ran out of time.)
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
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.
Running an online video encoding service (http://www.videopaste.com/), I think the number of users putting videos online in a professional (not a "video for video's sake") method is increasing every day. Maybe it's just a biased view that I have, or maybe it's the niche market we serve, but we're continually seeing a rise in userbase and quality of videos that are uploaded.
While it's nice to upload a video and share it with your friends and family, there are already many services doing this. I guess it would be nice not to have to remember yet another login (I can't recall my flickr login at the moment)... but... makes me wonder who will be in the video game next? SlashVideo.org?
--- http://www.keything.com
"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".
The "long photo" concept is just perfect for me now that I can shoot really impressive video with my Canon G9 digital still camera. I rarely shoot video with a traditional camcorder, but now that I can do 30 fps at 640x480 with my G9 I find myself using that feature a lot. I'll bet 95% of the videos on Flickr will be recorded on mobile phones or digital still cameras.
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
You can already make videos private on YouTube: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57958
There is already another video hosting/archive site that is allowing you to show you video to everyone, certain people, or just your self.
http://www.yimit.net/
Good idea: low quality, unedited, raw video clips matching high quality photos. People don't like & don't know how to edit video & the photo ties make it easier to organize.
Bad idea: selling the social networking angle more than the real value.
Wow, can't believe people still put out sites that look as crappy as this. C'mon, have to use the freeware Flash player? Can't make your own? I don't trust them. Would rather keep using blip.tv for my vids. Costs a little, but works darn good.
Aside from the risks to the Flickr photo community by introducing YouTube-style junk videos (and the people who are into that), it seems odd that a new video service would roll out with Flash as the only way to play. The iPhone and the growing number of competitors shows that mobile video is something that shouldn't be ignored by a service.
It really seems like Yahoo/Flickr is trying to get competitive with Google/YouTube, but YouTube has moved into the iPhone world while Flickr has introduced something that's comparable to YouTube from two years ago.
And has anyone else noticed the 90-second video length is ideal for advertising. I can't wait...
Only 100 millibits? Where do I download the app that performs this amazing feat of data compression?
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
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!
How about OpenID, so that you don't have to remember a login for any one video site -- or any one site, period?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
without having actually seen some of the videos being posted. I'm coming into this conversation a day late so my comment will most likely languish unnoticed, but I feel compelled to speak up so here goes.
;). Yes, there will undoubtedly be home movies of kids with bunnies rolling about on the lawn while the cameraman snuffles into the mic, but there will be more videos like this or creative memes like Fridgets - the "long photos" Flickr is hoping to promote.
I'm a pro Flickr user and I'm quite excited about the addition of video. The Flickr community, like any community, has a lot of bad with the good, but there's a greater amount of beautiful work available on the site. The interestingness algorithm is what makes Flickr stand out from the other sites, IMO. Youtube is a cornucopia of good and bad, but overall a dung heap of video, and the commenters are worse. Flickr video will be limited to 90 seconds and promoted by the enigmatic interestingness algorithm and the results will be of a higher caliber. The community, whose comments are mostly upbeat and helpful, will reward quality submissions and let poor submissions languish unnoticed (much like my comment will be
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming