PlanetEye

April 9th, 2008

Flickr Launches Video Service

Mark Evans

Director, Community

After an awful lot of anticipation and speculation, Flickr has finally launched its new video service.

Well, it’s sort of a video service given the maximum length of the videos is a whopping 90 seconds. And if you want to upload videos, you have to be a Flickr Pro member, which will set you back $25/year.

So why the 90-second limit, which hardly seems like it’s enough time to do or say anything? Here’s the official explanation from the Flickr blog:

“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.”

Frankly, I think the 90-second limit will be changed pretty soon because while Flickr wants video to “long photos”, 90 seconds is just not enough time to anything worthwhile or valuable. Flickr should also turf the pay-to-play uploading structure, which right now looks like nothing more than a way to jump-start Flickr Pro sales.

More: Paul Stamatiou has some thoughts about Flickr Video, which he says was originally limited to 60-seconds. Thomas Hawk describes the 90-second limit as “interesting” and something that “will likely keep a lot of copyrighted material off of the site”.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Video

Leave a Reply