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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.'"
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.
After reading through the FAQ, here's the GP's answer:
Go to "Advanced Search", then set "Search by media type" to "Only videos"
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
"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".
No reason to think it won't keep up.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
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