Flickr‘s long rumored video feature has arrived. I’ve gathered the details that Webware, Techcrunch and Wired have outlined:
- 90 second clips maximum – nothing longer initially at least.
- 150MB size maximum
- Uploads for Pro users only for the time being at least ($25/year for pro membership)
- Anyone can view the videos although you can still control the privacy of the videos like you do with photos.
- Videos show up alongside photos
- Videos can be shared, embedded individually or as part of sets.
- Video includes tagging, geotagging
- Search videos by tags, and descriptions
- Uploads directly from camera phones.
- Upload from web, uploadr, e-mail or API
- Option to view videos full screen.
- API for third party developers – yeah!
- Licensing options including creative commons.
- Support for English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese.
- 700 kbps
- 12 FPS, keyframe every 12 (fixed)
- Scaled within a 500×500 box with aspect maintained
- Audio is 44.1 kHz, steroe, 44kbps
- 2pass VBR, 700 kbps
- Photostreams are now coined MediaStreams to better describe the collection of photos and video.
To upload your video (if your a Pro Flickr member) head to the web uploader page (the Uploadr app can’t handle video yet) and upload your movie.
Flickr Videos are obviously intended to be a “video photo album” with small clips accompanying with photos. Certainly, this isn’t a YouTube replacement. Yahoo already has a competing product, with Yahoo Videos. That being said, who knows where this will lead. At some point we could see that 90 second rule laxed and eventually see more of a YouTube-type feature set. I’d expect the uploading capability will be rolled out to free account users eventually, but for now it’s a Pro-Flickr exclusive. One thing I’ve noticed while browsing the sample embedded videos this evening is that there are some slow buffering problems with playback, but that may be because of so many people accessing the very few videos out there at the moment.
Flickr has a nice long must-read FAQ on their new Flickr Videos.
Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.
Best use of Flickr video so far:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejacksons/2346371386/
That cat should definitely have a restricted drivers license!
I really think we’ll see some fun content on flickr video. Some have been negative about it “too short of time limit”, “don’t want video polluting photos” etc. but I think photo and video will complement each other nicely. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the API plug-ins after developers have had time with it.
The cat video is pretty funny – reminds me of a few nights I stayed up way too late….
I just don’t see why anyone would want a half-crippled video service polluting the service. flickr does one thing great. Now it does two things and one of them is remarkably lame.
With so, so SO many better video sharing choices…why now? Why flickr? What’s the point of 12fps video, for *anything*? I just don’t get it. at this stage, a video sharing feature has to be at least as good as those it competes with, and this is very much *not*, even as a first attempt.
My $0.02. YMMV.
@JimK – a LOT of people share your thoughts:
http://www.onlineobservations.net/protests-on-flickr-video/
Yeah, I’m with Jim… Though, I suspect they had to try to make a video land grab. Could be too late. I still don’t get why Yahoo killed the top worldwide photo destination. Which is neither here nor there.
And speaking of duplicity, do I really need another desktop(ish) video media player (Adobe)?
@JimK, Dave, Yahoo haters et al…
Why did thye add video? Ummm cause they can see from the log files the majority of photos posted come from cameras that also take video? EXIF data? Hello?
@JimK, Dave, Yahoo et al
I agree with Todd, This service has nothing to do with being a YouTube rival. Its about letting people who upload there photos to flickr and have a camera that shoots video, be able to upload there data to one place. It also lets users tag/geotag everything from one trip, in one place.(try explaining to mom, that your photos are on flickr.com/username and the videos are on youtube.com/username, instead of just bookmarking one place on there pc to see all of there childrens photos and videos). And like Todd pointed out, Yahoo can see that vast majority of its users are uploading from cameras that can record video
@Ben: While I get that, I *don’t* get why anyone would introduce such a lame-duck, half-programmed video service *now*.
I wasn’t comparing it *just* to YouTube, BTW. I was referring to the dozens and dozens of services out there that do video about a million times better. Yes, one place to upload might be convenient, but the video is essentially useless. They should have kept it in development until it was more fully programmed, IMHO.