Flickr Adds Video Sharing To Site

Flickr, the photo-sharing website, has introduced video sharing, confirming months of speculation that this would be the next step for the service.

Announcing the new function on the Flickr blog, community manager Heather Champ said that videos would be limited to 90 seconds and 150Mb in size.

“While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse,” she wrote, previewing the service with a puppet show clip.

“Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of ‘long photos’, of capturing slices of life to share,” Champ added.

The Yahoo!-owned photo site will be keen to differentiate its service from the video-sharing market leader, YouTube, and has been careful to integrate the service with the more cohesive Flickr community.

Videos appear alongside photos in a Flickr user’s photoset, but the video service will only be available to “pro” users of the site who pay $24.95 a year for more features and a bigger upload allowance.

Champ also announced that the site is doubling the upload allowance for free accounts and for pro accounts.

Flickr was bought by Yahoo! for $35 million in March 2005 and is one of the web company’s strongest web 2.0 propositions. The site topped two billion photos in November and between three million and five million images are uploaded every day (see Facebook And MySpace Visited By One In Five Online Britons).

Flickr: www.flickr.com/