Introducing Flickr Video
by Michael HoffmanTuesday, April 8th, 2008
A couple of years ago someone said to me, Michael, why doesn’t Flickr, which already allows for uploading of photos just add video. Wouldn’t that be a smart business thing to do and a natural, given that they already have the key elements in place. Well, yeah.
Late for sure, today Flickr launches Flickr Video.
This is not YouTube. Flickr has a limit of 90-seconds for video and what it looks like is that they are going only for those videos you record on digital camera, not all out movies.
In a bid to broaden Flickr if not actually crush YouTube, Yahoo is adding videos to what has just been a photo-sharing site.
The change, which the company plans to launch publicly later Tuesday, is a modest but significant extension of Flickr’s features. The videos, limited to 90 seconds and 150MB, will be shown as thumbnails alongside users’ photos, and will inherit all the features of photos stored on the site: users can add comments, captions, comments, geotags, and privacy restrictions so only friends or family may view the videos, the company said.
The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.
The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says).
In a phone prebriefing, I was very critical of the length limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion.
