“Inching towards broadening its reach, Flickr if not in fact strike YouTube, Yahoo is adding videos to what has just been a photo-sharing site.”
San Francisco — Yahoo Inc.’s well-known photo-sharing site is making a leap into video sharing, announced that in addition to its photo-hosting services, Flickr.com fans will begin to see more than just photos on their favorite site from now on.
“The debut marks the newest example of Yahoo attempting to catch up to Google in a crucial battleground.”
Starting late Tuesday or early Wednesday, the site will begin showing homemade video clips to the Flickr website. The videos, restricted to 90 seconds and 150MB, will be shown as thumbnails alongside users’ still photos, and will inherit all the features of photos stored on the site:
Users will be able to add comments, captions, geotag them, organize them into sets and share them with all of the same privacy and licensing options available for still photos. There will also be an embeddable player so users can place publicly-shared videos, YouTube-style, on blogs.
The company views the videos in action as “long photos,” moving snapshots people take now that digital cameras (except SLRs) can record video as well as still images, said spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten Neilson.
The anticipation is to fill up the site with “authentic” videos, not clips from last night’s TV shows, and Yahoo will police the site for any abuse of the terms of service, added Flickr product manager Shanan Delp.
Although the addition of video is a natural progression for Flickr, it is intended to improve the site’s offerings for its core user-base rather than create a rival for Google Inc.’s YouTube, said Katheline Jean-Pierre, Flickr product manager at Yahoo Canada.
“It is not to become a superstar, it is about sharing a moment,” she said.
“Canadians are big fans of creating our own digital diaries — using our cameras and mobile phones to shoot short videos featuring everything from our kids, to our pets, to our vacations,” she said.
Flickr’s latest technology is designed for amateurs and hobbyists searching for an enhanced means to share short video clips with family and friends.
“Over 42 million users visit Flickr each month and the site hosts in excess of two billion photos,” according to Yahoo.
The current announcement is subject to an additional limitation. While every Flickr users will be able to view videos, only those with ‘pro’ memberships, those who pay $24.95 annual subscription, will be allowed to transfer video clips of up to 90 seconds to the site, but anyone will be able to watch them. A security setting will permit videographers to limit access to the clips on Flickr if they want.
Once uploaded, the setting for videos can be made as public or private. Flickr is also allowing users the ability to mark videos as either “All Rights Reserved” or release them under a Creative Commons license.
Additional features — that includes editing tools — will be considered in due time once the existing Flickr user base has had a chance to give feedback on the new feature.
While the latest feature is planned to go live today at 6:00 PM, Flickr notes that, due to the scale of the worldwide implementation, it may take longer for the feature to be enabled on some accounts.
Flickr hopes its service will provide a more personal touch than the many other Web sites that feature video, and that will help differentiate it. Flickr managers also look forward to appeal to people looking to keep their video and pictures on the same site.
“What we are doing is going to meet a huge unmet need in the market,” predicted Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s general manager. “Most people are not showing their personal videos at all right now.”
However, Yahoo’s lack of ability to keep pace with Google in the lucrative online search market caused its profits and stock price to sag during the past two years, which in turn triggered an unsolicited takeover attempt by Microsoft Corp. for more than $40 billion.
While attempting to fend off Microsoft, Yahoo has continued to develop and introduce services that the Sunnyvale-based Company hopes that these offerings will help revive its earnings growth.
Flickr was created by Vancouver’s Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd. and acquired by Yahoo in March, 2005, for an undisclosed sum, reported to be about $30-million (U.S.).
The video service will be offered in English and seven other languages: French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese.