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

Really? That’s actually a pretty sweet deal.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.