Flickr has launched their video feature and it’s pretty unique. The service, only available to Pro members (those who pay $24.95/yr) offers unlimited uploads and storage. But Flickr restricts the length of clips to 90 seconds, file size to 150MB, and the content; nothing too racy.

Flickr is going for something different:

We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.”

Above: Beach Closups by Dunstan Orchard (cc)

And it makes a lot of sense, Flickr has built a community for semi-pro photographers, they have no reason to compete with YouTube. Instead, they have created a simple, elegant player that will fit in well with the high quality photos users are there to share, offers the opportunity to share artistic video in an original way, and they have made the experience a good one.

Reaction from users has been negative so far, but I think Flickr gets it, they’ve gone low-key on purpose. Users will seek them out to upload a very specific type of content (e.g the video above), and when viewing clips users will know it’s Flickr content despite the lack of player branding.

Tags: Flickr, yahoo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 12:04 am and is filed under Content, User Generated, Video Portals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.