YouTube announced a new feature today that allows uploading of videos from a mobile device that supports Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Users need to create a moblie profile before uploading videos. Sign up here.
I use my camera phone to upload pictures directly to Flickr all the time (yesterday’s banana-yellow ridiculous rental car, for example). If my phone had the ability to create video, I’d be using this for YouTube all the time, too.
And by the way, I’ll never understand why Flickr gave the video market away to YouTube. Maybe they (Flickr) know something YouTube doesn’t know about the real costs of this business.
See all
Post
Better to do one thing (photos) really well and be a leader in that field than to be mediocre in both and lose both to superior targeted offerings.
Very good considering the small storage capacity of most current phones.
YouTube Article: http://www.theweb20dev.com/wor.....lick-away/
Even if Flickr *had* gotten into video, they wouldn’t have built a YouTube. It’s all about demographics - YouTube got traction via MySpace and the mainstream users, while Flickr would have tried for the geek demographic once more.
Rod is also right about specialization - how many startups have successfully owned 2 markets?
“And by the way, I’ll never understand why Flickr gave the video market away to YouTube. Maybe they (Flickr) know something YouTube doesn’t know about the real costs of this business.”
I can’t believe how lousy uploaded video looks in YouTube, especially when compared to something like VideoEgg.com — YouTube is like the MySpace of video WTF OMG LOL
I disagree Pete. Photos and video are something that I want to keep together in the same albums. They are different versions of the same product (recording memories).
Perhaps Flikr knew that losing money on every customer and making it up in volume is not a good business?
When your only source of revenue is on Sand Hill Road you need to sell out fast and big or you’ll die.
We have some relevant experience here - http://www.pixparty.com has been in mobile video upload for the last 18 months and has tens of thousands of videos uploaded by users on their phones.
This is just email a multimedia file to the site, not much different from emailing a pix to the site. Once users figure out that it isnt a premium paid MMS and just an email with an attachment they use the service.
The flip side of course is that it isnt a premium paid MMS (which we assumed it would be when we started pixparty) and so it is not a revenue stream, just another channel to get content off the phone and onto the web which is great for users but bad for site owners.
(pp allows videos and pixs to be in the same galleries)
Mike,
But YouTube is fundamentally *not* a “Flickr of video”. As the previous commenter says, it’s more like a MySpace of video (with all the negative connotations that might imply). This has less to do with geeks and more to do with the 13-25yr old demo. Go look at the most discussed videos on YouTube - teens making video blogs. I don’t see anyone recording memories. Now go look at the comments - do all those LOLs look more like Flickr or MySpace to you?
If you want to store your photos and videos together, that’s even worse. That would limit Flickr’s growth to the same old geek set that I spoke about. By definition, that would prevent the video offering becoming bigger than YT.
you stupid asshole
Ya, this isn’t new. DropShots.com and Textamerica.com has been doing that for months.
Michael Arrington, you should check out DropShots.com if you are interested in sharing photos and videos in the same place. They do it pretty well.
it’s not too late for flickr to jump in to the video game.
YouTube is all entertainment.. the flickr brand is much more than that.
Pete:
sharing photos and video definitely seems like a natural pair to me. Flickr and YouTube may be after somewhat different markets/demographics but Flickr clearly could have gotten a decent chunk of the video space. Whether or not they would have become the market leader is debatable, but clearly they left value on the table.
Anyway, anyone who likes YouTube should check out Blog Cheese, because its so easy to use.
-Andrew
We’ve been doing this @ mocospace.com for months along with photos, tags, chat and more. It seems like a no brainer. And I agree with Michael, video and photos are not two different markets.
Needless to say MMS upload doesn’t work in Canada. Wouldn’t it be smarter to just support upload by email like blip.tv?
http://rolandtanglao.com/archi.....-in-canada
If you wanna see the real flicker of video, check out Vimeo.com.
Also, Vimeo gives you a personal email address you can send clips to and they get posted right away. Works great from cell phones. They’ve had this feature for like 6 months, too.
Don’t you just hate it it when good companies exist, but are invisible.
Michael’s done many pieces about Video-hosting on the net, with every new company temporarily thought of as the best cutting-edge one, from YouTube to Videoegg et al.
However, in ALL that time, there’s one little uk-based company that’s been doing all these features from (creator) tagging to mobile-uploading to integrated editing -even though it might be crap at hyping every last feature!!!
I think one problem might be that while it allows sharing, it allows privacy, so it’s not benefitting from the network-effect in the way companies like yt can become destination sites.
Anyway, go visit http://www.forbidden.co.uk or http://www.clesh.com
Kind regards,
Shakir
Very cool to see YouTube supporting video uploads. PixPulse.com supports a lot of carriers for multiple MMS and email uploads since last year (this is not fun, imagine dealing with a bunch of carriers just like Sprint).
I think that this is a potentially HUGE application - from a journalism, commercial and social point of view.
Many news events are captured by news crews by pure coincidence. 9/11 for example, crews were filming other things at the time of the atacks. BUT you know that there will have been thousands of other sources (video cameras, digital cameras, cell-phone cameras) that will have undoubtedly witnessed the tragedy too - but they have no-where to be posted.
This new YouTube move will allow real-time loading of live events faster than ANY news team could get there. Equally, the portability of mobile phones will ensure that as long as you can get a signal ANYONE can report anything from the most remote of locations and make it public.
London 7/7 was the epitome of this. Haunting images of bombed train passengers walking through dimly lit tunnels moved many people and put a shockingly different perspective on events that the news crews were not there to cover.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there is something in the pipelines where channels will be created on YouTube (ok, tags are already a step in the right direction) whereby content from live events can be email direct to YouTube.
Exciting times ahead!
I think this shows that YouTube is well in tune with its demographic, which I agree is probably on the younger “I am here for the fun of it” side. Those guys and gals are very plugged into their mobile life, and YouTube is ensuring that it keeps them engaged (for the short term) by offering them another way to create and share video content. The more (good quality) user generated content the better for them as it moves users away from the copyrighted stuff they’re constantly struggling with. They have a number of challenges and opportunities that they could be tackling right now and it’s interesting to see that they chose to move in this direction now in detriment of other things.
VideoEgg was mentioned above as sporting videos of of better quality than YouTube — the person forgot to mention when VideoEgg’s working. The publisher just goes “down” without warning, and the emails returned don’t immediately adress the problem. A terrible harbinger of things to come as they grow.
YouTube is bringing capability that has existed on a number of UGC sites for months. ClipShack, Addicting Clips, DropShots all have direct upload from mobile devices, and have had it since January. Granted, none of these sites has the popularity of YouTube, but at this point they are leaving the innovation to others and simply copying the best of what they see. No crime in that. But it is very likely that true innovators in the space will continue to develop new features and solutions. The game has only just begun.
We’re starting to see more and more mobile videos on where.com and the quality is actually better than I ever expected. We get a few dozen new video clips per day (all from mobile) and recently added the abililty to send a video message to a user’s profile right from the mobile.
The good news with mobile is we’ve got their phone number so there is some accountability if anyone posts something obscene - so far (knock on wood) we’re in the clear.
With more and more phones video enabled and the quality better than expected, I think this will be an important component to WHERE and other social media networks going forward. We recently added video support to our XML API so that people can reserve an address (E.g. address@where.com) and then pull all the video clips and pictures that were MMS’d to that address.
Hey Guys - I’m new here - but I don’t know technology at all. Why would the video quality of a video I uploaded be different on a videoegg.com or dropshots.com vs a YouTube? It would seem to me that if I had a certain pixel camera taking the shots… doesn’t it show up the same way on-line no matter which site I’m using?
Thanks! No idea!
I guess YouTube had the last laugh,…. all the way to the bank!
Has anyone actually tried this service yet on YouTube? How big a file can they handle?
The storage capacity on phones has been going up a lot recently. When phones became music players they needed storage capacity to store MP3s. There are phones now marketed with a specific focus on their ability to capture video. (I’m thinking that giant nokia transformer thingy).