If you’ve spent more than two minutes on the Internet recently, you already know and love photo-sharing site Flickr. Today the site is breaking some interesting new functionality, allowing pro users to post videos of up to 90 seconds. Rumors of video have apparently been floating around on site’s message boards for some time now, though today marked the feature’s official launch. Users haven’t wasted any time pulling together video-focused sharing groups to take advantage of the new feature.
Some people are questioning the wisdom of Flickr’s decision. Why, they point out, would Flickr launch video sharing when sites like YouTube already dominate most online video attention? I tend to disagree with this view because I think Flickr video can occupy an interesting niche for photographers. If you consider the way most people capture travel video these days, it tends to be short snippets from point-and-shoot digital cameras. When you upload these files, computers don’t really distinguish between photo and video – everything is usually lumped into the same folder. Thus there’s an interesting opportunity to allow users to share their photos and videos all in one place. Flickr is also limiting their video size to 150 megabytes or 90 seconds, which to me also emphasizes they’re looking to capture short camera clips, not your three hour long wedding ceremony (as heartwarming as it might be).
Only paying pro users can use Flickr Video for now, but perhaps they will open it up to others in the near future. Check out the help page to get started.