March 16, 2008

Video Coming To Flickr Soon. Really.

Michael Arrington

99 comments »

In mid 2005 I profiled YouTube for the first time. As Steve Rubel noted, the best way to describe it was “like Flickr, but for videos.” At the time few people saw the massive upside for YouTube, which was built completely on freely available Flash technology from Adobe. Flickr seemed like the far more interesting product.

Just a few months earlier Flickr had been acquired by Yahoo. And given how slow things were moving in 2005, few people thought YouTube would have the kind of success that Flickr had seen. But just a year later YouTube was suddenly worth $1.65 billion, and users were frustrated that they could upload their vacation photos to Flickr, but not the videos.

Yahoo has long promised to bring video to Flickr. In May 2007 co-founder Stewart Butterfield told us that users would be able to upload videos “soon.” This was reconfirmed in August 2007. But now, nearly three years after Yahoo bought them, and on their fourth birthday as a company, users are not able to upload videos to their Flickr accounts.

But rumors are flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks. Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers. They apparently have come to some product decisions, and will be making an announcement soon.

Yahoo PR and other employees are still dead quiet on the subject (I asked every one of them at the party tonight), but the buzz is growing and the leaks haven’t been totally contained. Get ready for Flickr Video. It’s coming. Really.

See Dan Farber for more.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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Fedquip

March 16th, 2008 at 2:29 am

Sounds great, as long as there is no region blocking.
I bet the artistic Flickr community could build a decent video collection.
Mathijs van Abbe

March 16th, 2008 at 2:36 am

Great news, hope the API will support it as well.
The new YouTube API’s for video uploading look very promising.
Mobypicture will integrate video updates next month, so this is a very welcome development.
Ghaus

March 16th, 2008 at 2:43 am

I think Flickr should remain focused on Photos. Videos will just kill all the Photos. Damn !
Richie Cunningham

March 16th, 2008 at 2:47 am

yeah flickr should pull their finger out and get on with it.
Robert Scoble

March 16th, 2008 at 2:48 am

Heheh, maybe that’s why tonight’s Flickr party was 21-and-over only. Flickr porn coming soon!?!
lawrence

March 16th, 2008 at 2:51 am

@3 - I’d have to agree. Flickr should remain solely photos.

If Flickr wants to start videos…they should create another, seperate division, like something called Recordr
Michael

March 16th, 2008 at 2:52 am

Very Cool ! Looking forward to it.
evirs

March 16th, 2008 at 3:03 am

whats the problem with big companies? why does it take 3 years to integrate a service that they already have (yahoo video) into flickr.
they better integrate the jumpcut technology into flickr video to make it more fancy than youtube.
Sneezy Melon

March 16th, 2008 at 3:09 am

Really looking forward to this.
Razvan Antonescu

March 16th, 2008 at 3:13 am

@Robert Scoble: Flickr already has tons of porn. You just have to be invited in the right groups
Orli Yakuel

March 16th, 2008 at 3:30 am

@evirs couldn’t agree more.

Same goes to delicious BTW… simply taking their time.

Take a look at:
http://www.ipernity.com
Clearly ipernity inspired (to put it mildly) by Flickr platform. But when it’s come to their video section, I think it is Flickr that needs to get some inspiration by them… http://flickr.com/photos/orliy1/2337344230/
iOnlinePhilippines

March 16th, 2008 at 3:36 am

That would be cool, great competitors for youtube.
Ameen

March 16th, 2008 at 3:51 am

Flickr, one of the best photo sharing websites ever.. Now, Yahoo is down and fighting off a takeover bid from Microsoft. As far as Yahoo is concerned they require some big app to challenge the Titan Google itself. In comes Flickr Video,
would be a great website if the interface, etc looks and works good. I’m sick and tired of the over cluttered YouTube webpage. I personally love the minimalistic art-like approach Flickr has..

Here’s to hoping that the same design philosophy has been followed and it’ll be one heck of a website to reckon with.. There r many art-directors who make great stuff, plus the Flickr community itself is one hell of a artistically inclined community..
Grayce

March 16th, 2008 at 3:55 am

Cool article. But check it out at http://www.quazion.com, which gets you the latest news from the most read and accepted blogs from across the world.
Alex R

March 16th, 2008 at 4:00 am

I wish they’d focus on the photography part.
Derrick

March 16th, 2008 at 4:05 am

Hope they do enough to differentiate themselves from the market leaders.
YDrive

March 16th, 2008 at 5:01 am

Yahoo! becomes active and proactive again..
rc

March 16th, 2008 at 5:01 am

they should integrate the jumpcut technology into flickr video

good article

rc

trading tennis blog
Rom

March 16th, 2008 at 5:09 am

About time!

I just hope that video will not eat up Flickr’s bandwidth!
Super Dude

March 16th, 2008 at 5:26 am

Come on Yahoo! I badly miss Stage6 and I would gladly pay for something that brings that experience back.
Sabeur

March 16th, 2008 at 5:58 am

I would also argue that videos would kill flickr. Youtube is for videos, facebook is for social networking and no point changing stuff
Ghaus

March 16th, 2008 at 6:02 am

Come on Guys ! Flickr is for Photos, and it should remain for Photos forever. Why are they offering this video feature, if you have to upload your vacation videos then the size of the video will be 500mb - 1gb , which depends on the length and quality. Do you all think that Flickr will be giving this much space for free ?
They will allow major features in Pro account, it will force all users to switch to Pro in order to get maximum benefit. This is not fair !
Tom

March 16th, 2008 at 6:17 am

Try to do one thing really well, not two or three things just ok. It’s a pretty basic rule in business, no? Flickr should stick to photos. If they’re really intent on adding video, they should split the site in two. One part vids, one part photos. Or just partner up with Vimeo, which has a somewhat similar community.
Ricky

March 16th, 2008 at 6:18 am

Great news, but also, Nokia’s new Ovi Share (http://share.ovi.com) is free, has over 2GB/month limit, and lets you upload photos AND videos already, as well as other media. It’s work a look, I think.
符碼印象

March 16th, 2008 at 6:20 am

I think it’s good for Flickr to provide kind of total solution of media files, photos, videos, audios…

A new transformation is coming.
NoNamePlease

March 16th, 2008 at 6:38 am

No please, flickr.Don’t do that , you should do your job, and that is photograph .If you join video job you will loose your photograph job.Please don’t do that
sakura

March 16th, 2008 at 6:58 am

I think that it’s all about being able to freely show yourself in different ways, videos or pictures or writing or reading or forums. I see sites that focus on stories such as fanfiction.net, videos such as youtube.com, and some sites like justexpressing.com that allow you to collect this different forms of expression in 1 place
børge

March 16th, 2008 at 7:01 am

You already can upload videos to the quite Flickr-like service http://ipernity.com/, which I like better than Flickr.
@gentbleu

March 16th, 2008 at 7:05 am

would prefer that flickr remained profitable and survived (while paying for their bandwidth) and left the free video bandwidth eaters to the Chinese…
Anthony

March 16th, 2008 at 7:24 am

Please no.
I care about my photos on flickr.
When they get swamped under a flood of you-tube style crapotainment, I will take them elsewhere.
Matt

March 16th, 2008 at 7:30 am

Adding video support to a site best known for photos may not make that much difference in the end. People seem to be stuck thinking in terms of seperate sites for their media - take imeem as a perfect example, with support for photos, videos and music some people describe it as ‘youtube for everything’ but most people talk of it as ‘youtube of music’.
You don’t have to look far on the site to realise that some users still upload videos to youtube and photos to photobucket. I think the music/video ratio on imeem must be something like 10:1, which is a shame because imeem video is vastly better than youtube.
ITrush

March 16th, 2008 at 7:35 am

Very interesting, keep us posted TC. Thanks

nhick
http://www.itrush.com
freight88

March 16th, 2008 at 7:56 am

Flickr keep doing what you are doing (and doing it well). Sorry LL

There is no reason othre than wanting to sell out.
Fabian Schonholz

March 16th, 2008 at 7:58 am

I agree with some of you; Flickr should remain 100% photos and then have an associated brand called “Flims” with just video. Both sites can be integrated to some extend and share security and have easy navigation between them. But why pollute a good brand?
Dan Croak

March 16th, 2008 at 8:04 am

I’m less interested right now in Flickr Video the product. I am interested in the story of why it has taken them so long. Can we get more reporting on the story? Was this a founders problem? A Yahoo problem? A technical problem? How could Yahoo let Google eat their lunch with YouTube the way they did when they had a tremendous opportunity to do the same thing with Flickr?
michael lewis

March 16th, 2008 at 8:09 am

i can not wait for this. I have tons of videos intermixed with my photos and i want to get them up there. It is amazing how long it’s taken them to do this. Instead of adding little features such as collections they should be spending all their time on bringing us video. Seriously, hurry up
Matt

March 16th, 2008 at 8:16 am

@27 … then don’t swamp them with video… Flcikr, like many services, will always remain what you make of it … this talk of people saying video on flickr is going to “ruin photos” is just poppycock… it’s not as though your photos are now going to have to be looked at in flash or any other unthought out assumptions you may be basing your near-attempt at an opinion on… “but the servers…” blah blah blah… your talking about yahoo here. pretend to understand infrastructure, scaling, and the difference between billions of dollars vs. a server in your closet.

I’m shocked at a lot of these comments here, Mike has clobbered others to the punch once again with exciting news we should all be having a fun conversation about instead people are acting like the MS deal went through …This move by Flickr is not only a fine one but also obvious and overdue… i just hope the “rumor” holds true…
Chris Thomson

March 16th, 2008 at 8:20 am

I hope Flickr doesn’t get video. We have enough sites for that already. Plus, we all know how Yahoo sucks at doing video work. Just look at their Yahoo! Video embed-able player. Yuck.

Flickr is fine the way it is, and because Yahoo! is now controlling it, I doubt there will be any changes (just like all the other Y! products, it seems).
Scabr

March 16th, 2008 at 8:26 am

Interesting as niche video+photo solution.
Ghaus

March 16th, 2008 at 8:47 am

First Photobucket was for Photos, now it supports video too. Look at the name and you will see it is all about Photos, but this is not the case. Photobucket is better in nothing, they added video feature just to get more traffic and they did.

Flickr wants the same, Flickr wants traffic now.

If Flickr is for Photos then it should better stick to it. They can add tons of more Photo features, Research and Develop new ideas around Photos. But why add Videos ? It does not make any sense. Again, this is because Flickr wants to eat some more traffic.
Thomas

March 16th, 2008 at 8:59 am

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Flickr, videos, whatever. Anyone want to talk about why AOL is hijacking my browser? I mean this is pretty outrageous behavior. Are they that desperate for viewers? Maybe Yahoo! will see this as legitimate viewer acquisition and decide to execute that boneheaded merger idea to keep away from Microsoft after all.
AOL is becoming the most desperate of losers…
Hanan Cohen

March 16th, 2008 at 9:24 am

GREAT!

Now we will see headlines like “The Chinese government has blocked the video sites YouTube and Flickr due to….”
Jonathan Coffman

March 16th, 2008 at 9:27 am

Flickr Video concerns me a little because they do imaging so well. But, we all thought that Apple did personal computers well and what did they do? Built an iPod several years ago.

If Flickr can bring the ease of use and speed and design of their photo offering to video, well then they probably will do a pretty good job. I’m already a Pro member (why wouldn’t you pay the $25 a year for unlimited photos and slideshows, etc?).

I was just about to start uploading all my videos to YouTube this next week, but I think I might hold off a few weeks just in case Flickr does launch a video offering soon.
jjjj

March 16th, 2008 at 9:37 am

Looking forwards to it.

—————–
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k9yIBOnbJjY
—————–
Nat

March 16th, 2008 at 10:05 am

That will be a great idea, photo,video and maybe mail too.

Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
Meet Folks Online.com

March 16th, 2008 at 10:08 am

That’s great news.
Bamboo

March 16th, 2008 at 10:12 am

If they do start video, and they want to really wow people and have instant success, they need to have quality like Stage6 video site offered. I hear in forums all the time about how they miss Stage6 and their quality was SOOOO much better than youtube.
Martin Kelley

March 16th, 2008 at 10:14 am

A Flickr site that lets me have my edited Jumpcut videos and lets me list and intergrate my Del.icio.us bookmarks if I wish. Why do I have to go to FriendFeed to get this?

I’m glad Yahoo has kept their hands off of their purchases but isn’t there any kind of advantage of pulling the Yahoo family of services together in an opt-in manner? Innovation at both Flickr and Del.icio.us really halted after they were bought. I realize that a lot of work probably needed to be done on the backend to rebuild their sites and I’m glad the Flickr team is thinking hard about how to differentiate Flickr videos and not just go the kitchen-sink bandwagon approach. But year ago Yahoo should have bought them all an insane amount of coffee and locked them all in a room together for a week so that I wouldn’t be stuck segregating my digital camera’s output onto two sites. I live on Yahoo’s services (and increasingly Google’s) and think they kick the pants off much of their competition, they just need to figure out a way of taking all this the next step and predicting what tomorrow’s internet users will want.
Eric

March 16th, 2008 at 10:34 am

Ugh.

I’ve put up with stupid policies, censorship, and innumerable other issues from Flickr in the last four years. To the point that I’ve seriously wondered exactly what it’d take to get me to abandon it wholesale. I’m pretty sure this will be it though.

Why the hell would someone, anyone, want to put videos on a site dedicated to photos and photography? The two are completely separate and distinct activities, and I simply can’t imagine how including video won’t be a huge detriment to the existing community.
Diskr

March 16th, 2008 at 10:41 am

Nice add, natural evolution..
joan

March 16th, 2008 at 11:05 am

Yahoo video on their homepage is bad so is there any reason to believe flickr video will be any better?
Ghaus

March 16th, 2008 at 11:34 am

Videos In = People Out = Traffic of Flickr down instead of going up !
Kevin

March 16th, 2008 at 11:47 am

It’s good news that yahoo! is planning to do something like YouTube..however Video with Flickr is not at all a good idea. Goal of the Flickr states that 1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. 2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos… It’s all about organizing, managing and sharing your photos… I love flickr because they have clear vision and thats what it is doing… however video with flickr is something looking strange… I think Yahoo! probably going to revise the Flick Goals(version 2 ;)) if they want to add video service to flickr. Better to start new service for video sharing and management rather than adding/integrating it with flickr…!!
Daniel

March 16th, 2008 at 12:06 pm

This is great. I hope they can manage not to turn into youtube, but I post my snapshots there & nowadays when I travel I often take little 30 second or 2 minutes videos. I want them all together so my friends and family can endure longer amounts of boredom.

I apologize for not posting more artsy photos to flickr, but the idea of “snapshots” will increasingly include short videos. I’ve always found the idea of vacationing behind a camcorder but a short video of the elephants in Thailand is fun.
Daniel

March 16th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Hmmm, that was supposed to be “I’ve always found the idea of vacationing behind a camcorder repugnant“
Michael

March 16th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

Sounds interesting.

But will it be the same for “Free” and “Pro” members? Maybe a system like webshots (only 100 video uploads for free).
xoost.com

March 16th, 2008 at 12:35 pm

wow, this would be great!
Lasse Rouhiainen

March 16th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

This is very cool development, however hopefully it will be different
and not just another video site.

Looking forward to hearing more about this

Lasse
James

March 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

The rest of you naysayers are all on crack. I hope they do integrate video and I’ve been waiting a long time for it. Images whether or still or moving can be artistic or not. Flickr is no DeviantArt but it caters to a wide range of customers.
h8terade

March 16th, 2008 at 2:59 pm

I agree with Matt.
I’m guessing Flickr video is not meant to compete or be like YouTube.

Most cameras (and mobile phones) now shoot both photos and videos.
How lame is it right now that if I want to share vacation photos/videos, I have to post to different services?

A few sites already have this and I think its a good idea. One place to view photos and videos.
Miracle Blade

March 16th, 2008 at 3:35 pm

It’s about time they offered video.
bad flickr

March 16th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

if flickr get’s flooded with a bunch of lame videos, im deleting my pro account and going somewhere else. flickr is about photography. it should remain that way. there’s already youtube. we dont need this crap on flickr.
Voices.com

March 16th, 2008 at 6:30 pm

Sounds like the logical next step. In short… I can’t wait.
Adam Moss

March 17th, 2008 at 1:40 am

They’ll have to make it unique enough from YouTube for people to want to use it instead of YouTube, but whether they’ll ever be able to compete with YouTube is another question. I suppose FLickr already has the userbase.

Perhaps they could add the ability to make a FLV slideshow, online using your uploaded photos? If they made the interface very simple so that anyone could use it, people could make their own videos online.
Simon Ovidiu

March 17th, 2008 at 2:26 am

That would be cool, great competitors for youtube.
Ben Jacob

March 17th, 2008 at 2:32 am

I don’t think flickr Videos will not be a competitor for YouTube and other players in Video Sharing industry.
Flickr might only wanted to provide its creative community a Video feature that enables Photographers to share their Sideshows,. or creative artists to showcase their Motion arts .

I always wanted flickr to provide a video sharing with not much features.. Just an analytic solution + video Upload,Share and embed function all an a Simple White color schemed player with Blue+Pink color schemes..
I love it
Scott

March 17th, 2008 at 7:33 am

Bad decision. I agree with #3, #6, 21. Yahoo, you already have you’re video sharing site. User’s like flickr because its a minimalist. Half, Not Half-Assed is the way to go.
Scott

March 17th, 2008 at 7:37 am

Differentiate yourself by improving video quality by using the streaming technology at Move Networks. They power the video at abc, cbs, fox, discovery, cw.
beto

March 17th, 2008 at 12:23 pm

There’s a reason why adding video to Flickr is a rather boneheaded idea, and it’s called BRANDING. Flickr has already carved out a niche positioning itself as THE site for digital photography, and this concept is already hard wired in the minds of many Web users out there. Adding video to the mix would not only water down the Flickr brand, but also hurt it in the long run. Not unlike what happened with Yahoo, coming to think of it… which, in turn, explains everything…
deb

March 22nd, 2008 at 12:17 am

and pls make flickr storage unlimited for free.
lol

March 24th, 2008 at 10:31 am

LOL, I just want flickr to add video to see the reaction of the flickr apologists.
Aran

April 9th, 2008 at 9:15 am

I just uploaded my first video last night. The quality was much better than YouTube. I tested it out using one of the video files that I had previously uploaded to YouTube.

I love the fact that I can use the same family restrictions on my videos as I already use on my photos.
Web 2.0 Blog

April 12th, 2008 at 10:30 am

It’s true, there’s definitely a quality improvement, but I doubt that will be enough to convert YouTube users, although that may not be the intention.