Flickr does video. Is this good or bad?
I love Flickr. They are the best photo-sharing site on the web, sorry SmugMug and Zooomr and all other comers. A whole bunch of colleges and universities are using Flickr as part of the institutional marketing - it’s a great way to connect and spread the message about your school. A few years back, we started an official Allegheny photo pool and have had a good response to it.
Last week, Flickr went and added video to its site, as in you can host videos there. At first blush, it seems like a great idea. They must have tons of infrastructure to handle the load since their purchase by Yahoo! I’m sure Yahoo would love to get more into video, especially since Google bought YouTube. Also, Flickr has very passionate users who would probably embrace this type of addition and they’ve got the brand equity to pull this off.
The devil, I guess, is in the details.
First, and probably most importantly, the video you post to Flickr cannot be any longer than 90 seconds. That seems so arbitrary. Flickr tries to make this a positive thing by saying these videos serve more as “a long photo” and that videos should be “simple - not overproduced or slick.”
That part doesn’t make sense to me, that they don’t want them overproducted. A bunch of photographers on Flickr create amazing, beautiful pictures that simply aren’t off the cuff. They are thought-out, produced, edited, adjusted, and so on. Photographers looking to explore video or video artists looking for an outlet want to work on their videos to make them what they saw in their minds. 90 second, off-the-cuff videos seems to work against that idea.
Secondly, in order to upload and share video, you must be a Pro member of Flickr. Not a big deal, but it costs nothing to post video at YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv and so on. It’s only $24.95 a year, but still.
Third, and this makes total sense from a legal perspective - no copyright material can be uploaded. They even go as far as to stress that even copyrighted music can’t be uploaded. Makes sense, but how are they going to handle the DCMA requests that will come flying in.
Let’s explore some of the technical side of their offering.
I think it’s a good idea to not break out videos from the UI too terribly much. When looking at a user’s photostream, videos show up much like photos would as you navigate. Here’s an example of a user’s page.
The quality of the encoding is good. Final quality will depend on the initial quality you supply to Flickr, of course, but in the videos I’ve explored they’ve been very good. Here’s two quick embeds to show you:
So, will we as college institutions use this? Our students may, but I don’t see a lot of schools using this very extensively. I don’t know of a lot times when 90 seconds do the job when it comes to marketing our institutions, our students or programs. There are just too many other very good choices. In fact, it may be one more service you monitor for what others are saying about your school.
Finally, it’s interesting to see the Flickr users protest this video service. Much like they did when Flickr made them use their Yahoo! logins instead of their old-school Flickr logins (me included), they are being very vocal about not being fans of this new service. They’ve set up photo pools (and more: 1, 2), discussion threads and inundating Flickr admins with nasty emails. Will these actions see any results? Tough to say.
Would love some feedback on Flickr adding video. Your thoughts?
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3 Responses to “Flickr does video. Is this good or bad?”
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Mike,
I’d love for you to go into more detail talking about how you guys use Flickr to market. You said that you have had a good response, but what does that mean? We haven’t gotten into using Flickr, but I guess it could be a possibility that we look into this summer after we get some of the other big issues sorted through.
The Flickr folks mentioned that they thought long and hard about the length restriction, and that 90 seconds was definitely not an ‘arbitrary’ decision. I would also say that the outrage is from a miniscule, yet terribly vocal minority. Most of the family members that I’ve talked to have enjoyed the fact that they don’t have to go to Flickr for photos and then go login to YouTube. That I can put my camera videos along with the photos and ensure that they have the same privacy or Guest Pass access is huge. And by ‘huge’ I mean ‘really huge’.
I think it is good that they have added this feature, makes them more well rounded and on par with other services. However the loyal fan base of Flickr users is being reluctant to let them grow. Other start ups, such as Pixamo, offer photo sharing on an equal level with video sharing, and in my opinion, are more poised for future success.