Video on Flickr

Posted on April 20, 2008

Just uploaded a couple of old videos (formerly shown as videoblog entries here) to Flickr.

First impressions about Flickr’s new video capabilities:

  • The 90 second limit is something I can understand for now, but which prevented me from posting some of my old videos (including my favourite one). If I do end up using Flickr to host my videos, though, I think I could make the 90 second limit work for me;

  • Not being able to choose the thumbnail for the video (something which is coming soon, I think) is really annoying, especially if you make a small white-text-on-black-background intro as I usually do. I do hope this changes soon;

  • From the two issues above I gather that Flickr isn’t really trying too hard to get into the full-fledged video hosting scene (as opposed to say YouTube), but rather they may be experimenting with making it easy for people to jot their mobile-phone videos down on the web. The thing is that here are already a couple (more?) good products out there that already do that, so let’s see how that pans out for them;

  • The privacy and permission settings and controls already in place for photos also work on videos and that is a most welcome feature indeed!