Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube?
Better than youTube?
Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field. So is Flickr video better than youTube or just different?
My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.
“long photos”
Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video, and something that youTube does not really have is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.
London Video group
Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related. All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.
To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.
I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?
Better than youtube
Yes or no?
Related posts:
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Catch me on 
There are a lot of people who are not happy with this development. More than 12000 by this article’s count:
http://www.onlineobservations.net/protests-on-flickr-video/
The Flickr group for protesting against video seems pretty weird to me. There’ll still be plenty of groups for serious still photography, heck you can even join groups that only allow monochrome if you really want to.
By the way, here’s a site that uses the Flickr api to browse pages of thumbnails which lead to the many Flickr videos that have been uploaded already:
http://mattcrampton.com/flickr/
Strange that I’d somehow not noticed, despite being on flickr more or less every day. I’d even spotted some little badges but didn’t think to read the emails or whatever. Hmm. Needs thought.