Flickr, the popular photo sharing website home to over 2 billion images, has finally launched video on Flickr. The catch? Videos can be no longer than 90 seconds in length and 150mb in size. But have no fear, because Flickr has actually done this for good reason.
Brilliant Concept - “Slices of Life”
“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.“
- Heather Champ, Flickr
That last part is the brilliant concept. The folks at Flickr didn’t just release another flash based video player, they created a platform that would “complement the flickrverse”.
The 90 second time limit and 150mb size constraint will help users use the Flickr Video service the way it is intended to be used. Not for watching the latest episode of your favorite TV show. Not for catching the latest political speech. Flickr Video is for capturing what photos have always captured — a moment.
Capturing a Moment in the 21st Century
For too photos have continued to be used in the online world to capture and share our moments. They were invented in a time when the medium for viewing them was not a screen capable of displaying motion. Nor were they invented in a time when the medium for viewing them was capable of producing sound. Yet in the online world of the 21st century, we have both, readily available on our computers. Why are we still capturing and sharing our moments in a form that does not make full use of these advantages?
Flickr realized this, and has provided the solution.
Flickr Video - A Differentiated Service
The press coverage for Flickr’s launch of video sharing has been describing it wrong.
Take for example, the following quote from the AP’s Michael Liedtke:
“Yahoo Inc. will begin showing homemade videos on its online photo-sharing site, Flickr, in a long-anticipated move that may be too late to lure most people away from the Internet’s dominant video channel, Google Inc.’s YouTube.
Flickr’s video technology, to debut late Tuesday, represents the latest example of Yahoo trying to catch up to Google in a crucial battleground.”
What is important for people to realize this isn’t a new online video sharing service that will compete with YouTube, but rather, a service that will fulfill one niche that people may use YouTube (or others) to currently satisfy. There is a difference.
The ability to contain all your captured moments, whether they be pictures or video, in one place, is a compelling offering that Flickr now uniquely owns.
The Future of Flickr Video
While the feature has just launched, it will be very interesting to watch if it takes off as I believe it will, revolutionizing how we share our moments in the online world, or if its brilliant concept will simply be lost in the sea of online video sharing services.
For Yahoo, who many believe made a poor choice in acquiring Flickr in 2005, this may be one of the smartest and most important moves the company has ever made.