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Imgur Launches Video
The online image sharing community Imgur is launching video after years of hosting still images and GIFs on its platform. "This is a monumental shift for our future, and it furthers our commitment to becoming the world's greatest community powered entertainment destination," the company said in its blog post. The Verge reports: Roy Sehgal, Imgur COO, tells The Verge that the company is "breaking the sound barrier to make Imgur an even better community-powered entertainment experience." Videos play everywhere you can use Imgur (on both mobile and desktop), but so far, only iOS users are able to upload them. The feature is expected to come soon to other platforms. Imgur has also told TechCrunch that it plans to add video editing tools in the future. Videos will thankfully have sound off by default but you can click or tap to play the audio. You can search for videos with the hashtag #unmuted. Like GIFs, videos on the Imgur platform are meant to be short and have a limit of 30 seconds. And Imgur is likely going to use the opportunity to insert video ads to help make the service more profitable.
Wow. Video... on the internet. This shit is gonna change the fucking world as we know it.
Two guesses:
1) Money: Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is vastly more expensive than static images and most GIFs. A limit of 30 seconds lets them control that some, and it's a restriction they could always lift later (while going the other way - starting with unlimited and then later forcing a 30 second limit - would cause lots of whining from users).
2) Memes: Imgur's whole angle is centered on sharing funny / amazing / shocking / whatever images and short clips via GIFs. It's their brand, that's what people know them for. Letting people upload lectures and TV shows and long home movies doesn't fit with that.
Never share another thought. They are inane and your grammar is poor.
Bro, this is Slashdot! What did you expect? Did you expect me to be posting in my genius persona?
A genius might only come up with a few really good insightful thoughts in his/her entire life, and even Einstein had some utterly inane and completely wrong ideas. Don't have high expectations of people. Just enjoy their company. And you won't be disappointed.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Another reason might be that they don't have to deal with copyright policing to anywhere near the same extent with shorter videos. They don't have to make radical changes to their business model, and they can gain a foothold in the GIF and short vid markets.
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AFAIK all their stuff already technically had video (most were even mp4s), but you could count on it being silent. Looks like Imgur links will no longer be relatively safe to open in a quiet environment.
As a side note, the animated gif is a testament to the importance of compatibility and adoption for a file format. It sucks at compression and quality, and doesn’t support any sound whatsoever.
How many expert committees and standards organizations and patent wars revolved around implementing and promoting dozens of “superior” video formats (including codecs and containers and server/client software)? Despite all that effort and conflict, the animated gif reigned supreme as THE most widely used video format of the internet, at least until the rise of Youtube (and it was still competitive for a while afterwards). Because it works absolutely everywhere, since the 90s.