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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.'"
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
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.
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!