Back in mid-March this year, we wrote about a rumor that Flickr Video would be here sometime in April. Well, it’s April and as it turns out, the rumor was true. Flickr Video has finally launched. It launched yesterday, and so far it’s received some mixed reviews from people disappointed about some of the limitations that have been put in place for the new service.
The first limitation is simply the fact that it’s available only for Pro members. These are the members who pay $24.95 for an account for unlimited uploads and storage as well as unlimited sets and collections. Why just the Pro users? The Yahoo Blog explains a little bit by saying “Pro members are the most active, dedicated members of the Flickr community and are the foundation to all we do at Flickr.” Fair enough, if people want to use videos, they’ll have to pay a very reasonable yearly fee.
Next on the list of limitations is the length of videos. This is where people are starting to complain because videos can only be 90 seconds long. Flickr says, “we’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new.” Something new it is because other video services out there, even Photobucket which is somewhat comparable to Flickr doesn’t have a 90 second limitation and it’s open to all of their users. Flickr’s big thing is that they want to be sure that the videos people are uploading are actually theirs and not a video owned by someone else, maybe one with copyrights. What this limit does is helps prevent material that’s copyrighted from being uploaded.
Below is an example of what a Flickr Video looks like embedded into a site:
Another point that the Flickr team made is if they were to increase the limit, well, who really wants to sit through and watch 30 minutes of your best friend’s wedding? People are more likely to view the shorter clips than sit through a long video. On the Flickr blog, they say “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.”
Aside from the 90 second limitation, they also say that videos can’t be any larger than 150 MB. Here’s the thing. 150 MB is actually a pretty decent size for a video that’s only 90 seconds long. I went and looked at a couple of video clips I’ve taken with my camera and one was 32 MB and was 1 minute and 33 seconds long while another video was 95 MB and lasted 4 minutes and 35 seconds. Maybe Flickr could change their limitation rule a bit so that videos can either be 90 seconds long or up to 150 MB in size?
All in all, we’re a bit disappointed with the limitation on the length of videos. One and a half minutes really doesn’t give anybody much time to share something with friends and family. Maybe a 3 minute or 5 minute limit would be more satisfying? What is nice about Flickr Video though, is their player (shown above). They kept it clean, and left a watermark off of it. It really does look nice. Perhaps after Flickr has reviewed some of the feedback they’ve received over the last few days, they’ll consider upping the length just a little to better accommodate more of their Pro users that want to share videos longer than 90 seconds in length.
Even though we’re a little disappointed with the limitations, Flickr Video is here!
Thanks for the tip Omar and Change!
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Tags: Web Sites, Flickr, Photos, Videos, Yahoo
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I also agree that the 90 second limitation is a bit strict. For me, 3 minutes would be perfect.
90 seconds, 180 seconds.. both would be fine in my opinion. I think you can do great artistic stuff in that timeframe, and I believe that this is what Flickr is for. They’ve called it moving pictures, and like this it does become moving pictures and not really movies. I would expect that it drives a different type of content, which will make them different from the rest. That might turn out really positively.
A limit on size alone would allow people to encode badly, which not only degenerates the quality of the videos (and thus the brand – Flickr), but also makes it possible to put 30 minute videos online. That is an invitation to illegal content again
By the way – they increased the size per photo for all users (see their blog announcement, it’s at the end).
A lot of people don’t like the idea, and some of these are pro users:
[onlineobservations.net]
There are certinaly going to be people that try to get artistic with the 90 seconds they are given, and those 90 seconds will probably be plenty. However, for those who use Flickr as a photo sharing service for friends and family, they’re going to want to share the videos they take on their camera with those people just as they do their photos, and 90 seconds may not be enough.
Hmm, good point Ashley.
I get that they’re trying to avoid the illegal content, but I would have liked to see a slightly larger time limit. Maybe 5 or 10 minutes? I would be okay with that, but I actually don’t have any movies that I want to upload that are under 90 seconds. Hopefully they’ll consider revising their policy.
I think 90 seconds is ridiculous. I have a point-and-shoot camera which allows me to make videos and a lot of my videos are like 3-4 minutes each. I think I’ll still be able to upload those, but then only view the first 90 seconds (like regular users could upload as many photos as they want within their monthly limits, but only be able to view the last 200 uploaded). Obviously, some of them are a lot shorter and would make the cut with the 90 second limit, but it’s still ridiculous. Pro users pay for Flickr so they could get unlimited uploading. Maybe they should have made a 90 second limit for regular users and unlimited for Pro users? This 90 seconds is bull. I’m very disappointed with their decision. Maybe they should also change their photo upload limit to 1 MB per photo, because you know, it would be really artistic for someone to pull off a 3-exposure photo into an HDR photo with a 7-10 megapixel camera, and then be able to compress that into 1024 kB. //end rant >:(
I think the 90 second limit is a little strict, but 3 or 4 minutes would be fine – going up to 10 may mean split 3-part copyright violations. If they set a size limit you’d see badly encoded TV series popping up all over the place, though I guess an interesting thing is that if they’re only offering it for Pro accounts they could just insta-ban anyone who was found uploading copyrighted material.
To be honest I was always skeptical about video on Flickr – they do photos so well that it seems a shame that their attention should be diverted – I’d rather they brought in something like privacy options for tags. Nevertheless a lot of my albums do consist of videos at some point, and assuming I can split the longer ones it will be nice to have them included in the photostream for each set as it tells the story better.
Flickr Pro accounts are free if you use AT&T/Yahoo as your ISP. This happened sometime last year — around the time I stopped using flickr. :roll
Ryan and I actually had a conversation about the point you just made yesterday. People who have a Flickr Pro account have it for a reason, and so if they violated Flickr’s terms, they could easily lose their account and all of their photos like you mentioned, an insta-ban. Just knowing that you could lose your account if you posted copyrighted material would probably be enough to keep most users from doing it.
Really? That’s actually a pretty sweet deal.
How are you all missing the compression aspect? What formats/codecs/compression does Flickr video support? Depending on that, the 90-second limitation changes its meaning. Looking at the video above for instance, it either looks to be encoded in H.264 or maybe its uncompressed.