Flickr Video: Pay Us & Take It Easy

Written by R. Scott Raynovich - Light Reading

Wednesday, April 9. 2008 at 09:20 AM EDT Post a comment

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

• Login to Rate

Photo-sharing powerhouse Flickr has added one feature, and never has the techno-bloggo-world been so excited. Everybody has been typing away about the addition of video uploads to Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)'s photo site.

My biggest question: Does this mean that we now have to stop referring to Flickr as "the photo-sharing site" and start calling it the "photo- and video-sharing site"?

Probably not. Given the reviews out there by tech punditry, Flickr's not about to become a superpower in video sharing: It's added an incremental feature, and one that has limitations. Michael Arrington points out on Techcrunch that the videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150 Mbytes in size. And users will need to subscribe to Flickr's "pro" service for $25 per year. (You have to pay? Gasp!) And all of this gives Arrington another excuse to keep hyping the bizarre puppet shtick.

Flickr itself writes on its corporate blog:

90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the Flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

You've got to love the part about memorizing "Community Guidelines." Good stuff. That's why I don't normally consume my news from corporate blogs. I think what these Flickr-er people are saying is: "We don't want to become some giant cesspool of commercial video spam." But that could just be me.

With size limitations and a cost involved, it doesn't look like video is suddenly going to become the core function of Flickr, nor will it threaten YouTube Inc. . But all those Flickr-ers out there will be happy.