Tuesday, April 8th, 2008...9:19 pm - Gary Hayes
Flickr to become the next YouTube?!
Announced in the last couple of days, is this the start of media based social networks (flickr, youtube, joost, vimeo etc) starting to converge on being able to carry all your media?
…well not quite at the moment as they (flickr with 4 000 000 users) are only allowing 90 second clips to be loaded up alongside your treasured still images, but surprising they have a 150MB limit on the file. So for 90 seconds that makes it pretty high quality, more than the usual lower end YouTube flash video. Tech crunch covers this in some more detail here
The video player itself is extremely clean, so videos look like photos on pages that include them. Videos can also be embedded, of course, as we’ve done above.
Another great feature is the ability to play the videos from the thumbnail screens
as well as the permanent page for the video.
Flickr video also differentiates itself from YouTube by only allowing pro users upload videos (it costs $25/yr to be a pro user), although both free and pro users can view videos. As with photos, videos can be made public or private. They can also be shared/embedded individually or as part of sets. But like YouTube, Flickr is providing an API for programmers to create services that access videos hosted on Flickr.
Other standard Flickr features are also available for video, such as search by tags and descriptions, uploads directly from camera phones, and various licensing options.
With this launch, video sharing sites that have focused on privately shared videos should be worried. These include Motionbox, Viddyou, and Vimeo, among others.
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