Webware

A little under a year ago, Flickr began hosting video alongside its online photo service. One of its shortcomings was that it did not support high-definition video, which in the past year has become a major feature on point-and-shoot and digital SLR cameras, as well as popping up on major video-hosting services like YouTube. Video was also only available to Flickr users who were subscribed to its $25 annual professional membership.

On Monday, both of these limitations have been lifted. HD is now available to paying pro users, whose previously uploaded clips will be re-processed to fit inside the new 16:9 HD player by the end of the week. Flickr is also opening up its video feature to free users, although their HD videos will only play in the SD player.

Flickr's Pro members will be able to upload HD videos and view them in an updated 16:9 player.

(Credit: Flickr)

While beautiful looking, two large limitations remain: videos must be 90 seconds or less in length and be under 150MB in size. With standard definition videos this size limit is fine, but in a 1:30-minute test clip I did on my Nikon D90, the file was well above that limit at 252MB, meaning whatever I was shooting in HD would have to be much shorter, or be compressed in a third-party piece of software before uploading. For most people, neither of these options is ideal, and Yahoo should really address them in a future update. I have the feeling many folks will simply continue to go to YouTube, Vimeo, or another service to offload that footage instead.

Along with the bump to HD, Flickr is rolling out a new feature as part of its explore section called the Flickr clock, which will let viewers browse videos by the time of day they were recorded. The company opened up a special group for video submissions back in late January, and the process involves users manually adding a special "machine tag" to their clips to let the system know when it was taken. The clock was designed by Stamen, who is also responsible for Trulia's real estate visualizations, and more famously Digg's live activity visualizations.

The new Flickr 'clock' lets you view videos by what time of day they were taken.

(Credit: Flickr)

Update: There are a couple of things worth noting that we didn't know at the time of posting this. The first is that Flickr has taken off the limit of sets free users can create. The previous limit was three, so this is good news. The bad news is that free members can only upload two videos a month as part of the new rules. If you were planning to do this using Flickr's software Uploadr, you'll need a new version of it to do so. Users who upload through Flickr's Web interface need not bother.

Also, streams to the HD videos have already been made available to services using Flickr's APIs, meaning you'll soon be seeing them in third-party browsing and posting applications.

Jumpcut let people upload, combine, and share videos. Now it's in maintenance mode.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo's belt-tightening has led the company to shut down new uploads to its Jumpcut service for sharing and combining videos, steering people instead to its Flickr service.

"We're sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut," a note on the site said Wednesday. "It was a difficult decision that we wish we didn't have to make, but it was necessary in order to focus resources on other Yahoo sites."

Jumpcut now steers users to Yahoo's photo-sharing site Flickr, which got video abilities earlier this year. Jumpcut won't be shut down, and existing videos won't be deleted, but without the ability to upload new videos, it's clear the site doesn't have a shining future before it.

Yahoo acquired Jumpcut in 2006, but the service never made it out of beta testing.

Yahoo laid off 1,520 employees last week and is in the midst of a review of all its business units to see which should be preserved. The company is under fierce financial pressure that only got worse with the recession and increasingly gloomy forecasts for online advertising.

Jumpcut let people upload and share videos, but also combine them into larger works. This option is still available for existing videos, but people's remixed videos can't be downloaded.

"Jumpcut was built to assemble your movies in real-time so you wouldn't have to wait for rendering. The flip-side of this design means there's no single 'file to download,'" the site said. "There are third-party tools like http://www.clipnabber.com that you can use to get a partial download of your Jumpcut movies in .flv format, but the files created won't include any titles, transitions or effects that you added using the Jumpcut editor."

For video editing, the site steered people away from the cloud toward PC-based applications: Windows Movie Maker and Apple's iMovie.

(Via TechCrunch.)

It only took Flickr four months to get around to it, but user-created videos now sit alongside photos as part of the widely-used slideshow tool.

Previously videos, which are still a beta feature for paying pro members, resided in their own island. If you were putting together a special set for a slideshow, you'd have to open up the videos separately. That problem no longer exists--much to the bemusement of vacation photo and video enthusiasts.

Flickr has also increased the presence of slideshows around the site, including where you can fire one up. This is most noticeable on search results and people you're not friends with on the service. The UI has also been improved to scale smaller photos and videos to fit the screen as it sees fit--something the company is calling "embiggening."

What might be the most useful improvement however is that you can now embed a slideshow outside of Flickr. There had been a handful of third-party tools to let you do this, but nothing official--or easy. You'll now find a "share" option on the top right hand corner of any slideshow, and you can grab that same code from within an embed too.

Below I've put together a small collection of photos and videos in case you want to give it a spin. Be sure to toggle the full-screen option (in the lower right hand corner) to have the photos scale to your display.

I chatted last week with folks at Flickr to catch up on the video hosting service it launched less than a month ago.

It's proven to be popular, despite a small uprising from a portion of its diehard users that was later quelled with Yahoo-subsidized doughnuts. Flickr wouldn't share the exact number of videos that have been added, but the site is teeming with them. A casual advanced-search for videos with a space in the title yields more than 124,000 clips, but the true number is likely to be significantly larger.

Flickr's splash into the video hosting scene last month was slightly overshadowed by two hurdles that people had to jump over to get their clips online. The first was the necessity of the $25 per year pro membership, something that's still required. The other was time, with videos capped at 90 seconds--roughly half the length of the average Internet video clip, according to research done by ComScore in January.

A Flickr representative says it's happy with the controversial 90-second limit. Of all the uploads, says Shanan Delp, Flickr senior product manager, 92 percent were well within the cap, meaning the other 8 percent came from people who attempted to upload videos that were too large. Additional time will almost certainly be tacked on at a later date. But for now, the company plans to keep the limit throughout the beta period, as well as keep the video uploading privileges reserved to just pro users. Part of the reason for the cap has been for scaling purposes. Flickr has more 20 million users. While an unknown percentage of those are pro members, even small videos can use up more bandwidth and storage than an entire roll of photos.

So what are people doing with videos? Delp says there are two distinct trends: one of people grouping together their clips into video-only groups, and one of people who are mixing both forms of media into shared pools. Some groups are even banning videos from being added at all.

Delp said, one of the more interesting groups to come from this has been stop-motion video--a feature found on new-model, mid- to high-end digital cameras. The company also created its own video meme with "fridgets," or short clips of people opening up their refrigerators and looking for something to eat while filming the activity on their digital cameras. The group pool for that currently has more than 50 clips.

One of the stranger video trends to hit Flickr is 'fridgets,' which are videos of people opening up their refrigerators and filming the often mundane experience.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One notable feature to come with the addition of video was the company's decision to make it immediately available for use in Flickr's standard data API. So far, there have been few services to take advantage of this, including Yahoo's own video-editing tool Jumpcut. Kakul Srivastava, Flickr's general manager, says that there's still work to be done with the Jumpcut team before Flickr video gets tie-ins, but that they're on track to deliver something that's seamless for users of both services.

In the meantime, one of the cooler creations to take advantage of Flickr's video API is a video browser put together by Matt Crampton. It takes a smattering of some of the latest videos and puts them together on a giant array that people can watch without having to venture on Flickr.

Tags could be the next thing to get a tweak for videos, a format that lends itself to timed tags.

So what's next for videos on Flickr? Soon people will be able to edit the thumbnail others see on their videos--something that's currently decided for them. Users will also be able to make time adjustments to pick the start or end of a video, reupload clips, and rotate videos that had been shot sideways or upside down.

Reuploading will be a necessity for people who want to go in to make an edit or make adjustments while preserving users comments, tags, and usage statistics. The company is also in talks with camera vendors regarding video metadata that could do more analysis and charting of video usage on the site, such as what's been seen in the camera finder charts.

In the near future, I'm expecting a big change in the way people are able to add tags to video clips, something that's identical to the tagging system used for still images. Back before Flickr had launched video, I had asked Srivastava about using a system like Viddler's to add tags per single frame or entire sections of frame. While she wouldn't divulge whether they had a working version of it in development, she said that it's something "we'd love to explore."

More recently, Flickr has started to make videos a larger part of the site and the built-in discovery tools. Over the weekend, videos began making their way into the explore section of the site. Previously, they had been separate entities, but the team has since tweaked the "interestingness" algorithm to include video clips too.

What would you add to Flickr video?

The We Demand Donuts group takes a jab at those who objected to Flickr's new video service.

(Credit: Flickr)

First came Flickr video on Tuesday. Then came the anti-Flickr-video outcry on Wednesday. Now there's the anti-anti-Flickr-video outcry.

This last movement takes the highly facetious form of Flickr's new We Demand Donuts group. "If we get 20,000 people to join the group Flickr will be forced to give us free donuts!" the group's manifesto states. "Join the group and invite all your contacts. We will make this the biggest protest group on Flickr and force them to give us free donuts!"

There are some subtleties here, but given the timing, it's pretty clear that this group's raison d'etre can be translated as, "Give us a break, Flickr members who are signing petitions demanding that Flickr scrap its new video service."

More than 550 have joined so far. The No Video on Flickr group has more than 9,700.

Update 8:08 a.m. April 11: Flickr capitulated, at least on a geographically limited basis. "We at FlickrHQ have heard of your noble efforts and seek to answer your cries for justice," said Matthew Rothenberg, a Flickr employee, in the group's discussion board. He promised to buy doughnuts for Flickr members who meet up at a yet-to-be-determined San Francisco shop April 16.

Members of the No Video on Flickr group have posted hundreds of images protesting the photo-sharing site's inclusion of video.

(Credit: Flickr)

Shortly after Flickr added videos to its photo-sharing site, a number of users are up in arms.

The No Video on Flickr group amassed more than 4,000 members just a few hours after the new feature launched.

"I love Flickr, and I think it should stay the same way it has always been," the group description said. "We don't need another YouTube! I have nothing against YouTube, I just don't want to see all the $*#% that's on there to wind up on here!"

Personally, I find the concerns overblown, though it might have been judicious of Flickr to add an opt-out option for those who don't want video. A lot of people react unfavorably to change--think film buffs who don't care for digital cameras, for one example.

And I suspect video is likely to dilute the great photography that's available on Flickr much less than the vast oceans of mediocre snapshots on the site. The days of Flickr being a haven solely for refined, high-grade photography are long gone if indeed they ever existed. Also, who knows? Maybe the addition of video will help improve Flickr's business so it can be overhauled with a better user interface.

Flickr member Haeretik posted a petition, so far signed by hundreds of members, that states, "We all joined Flickr because of its dedication to photography and photographers, and we want Flickr to remain true to this dedication. It is our request that this feature and addition to Flickr be removed."

Some discussion on the gripe group has been constructive. For those who don't want videos to play, there is a Flickr configuration setting that lets users reverse the default behavior that the video will play automatically when its page is opened, and Firefox users can add extensions that block Flash videos.

(Via Thomas Hawk)

Update: Information about the frame rate has been updated, see more below.

Today Flickr is introducing the single biggest change to its service since launching in 2004--video. The photo service is rolling out the capability to upload video clips of up to 150MB to its paying Pro members. Free members will still be able to view these clips, but will be unable to add their own, at least for the time being.

The company has taken a very different direction than I originally imagined by limiting user video clips to just 90 seconds. It's a far cry from the arms race of higher quality and unlimited length offered by services like Vimeo, Viddler, and even YouTube to a certain degree.

That's not to say videos will look poor and grainy, though. The system has been designed to scale any clip you can throw at it, including high-definition from high-end point-and-shoot cameras or your HD-capable camcorder. The frame rate also maintains 30 FPS, which is half the speed of video captured on most modern point and shoot digital cameras, but a step up from the 12 FPS that was available while I was testing the service over the weekend.

Flickr videos can be played right in the stream of thumbnails. You can also jump to the full-quality version of it with one click.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What Flickr is trying to do with these small clips is provide a place for people to post and share the little videos they're capturing on their digital cameras. The throwaway items that are still very watchable, but hardly worth spending the time to upload to a separate service. The company knows this move will turn many off to the new service, but as part of the Yahoo ecosystem there are important boundaries that dare not be crossed. In light of Yahoo Photos shutting down last year to make way for Flickr, the company seems to have recognized the importance of brand separation and seems intent on creating these artificial boundaries if only to keep people from being confused.

The folks at Flickr say the time limits were not a move forced from having to share company resources with Yahoo Video. Kakul Srivastava, director of product management at Flickr says Yahoo Video is all about giving people a place to create their own content channels and drop those large videos. Her vision for Flickr video is simply to popularize the longer version of photos--something they hope becomes an artistic medium, and that people simply get used to taking alongside their still photography.

So how do videos fit in with the photos? Quite well, actually. Glancing at someone's photo stream (now classified as a media stream), photos and videos sit side by side with no differentiation besides a small play button in the bottom corner of video thumbnails. Like photos, you can simply click on them to go to the page that contains all the usual things like user comments, tags, and metadata, or you can simply view the video in its thumbnail size right in the stream--complete with player controls. It's absolutely wonderful, albeit tiny.

The player is a modified version of the one found on Yahoo video with controls that fade away after a few seconds to reveal the full shot. Users can embed clips on third-party sites as they would anywhere else, and developers can pull in them in through the same data API that's helped integrate Flickr into all manner of third-party tools and services. Expect to see Flickr videos making their way to photo mashup and editing services in a few weeks--JumpCut excluded (for now at least).

Getting your videos on there in the first place is almost as easy as viewing them. Videos can be uploaded at the same time and the same way you're used to uploading your still photos. The Web uploader takes them just fine, and so does an updated version of the desktop software for PCs and Macs. Once your videos are on the service, you can't get them back to your hard drive, something I'm told will be coming later on.

Video on Flickr is off to a good start, but with the artificial time limitations, I find it to be unsuitable for most of the clips I take. For those I'd be better off uploading to a standalone video service with more generous time and file size limits. I can only imagine some of my less tech-savvy friends trying to upload a video that's slightly over the size or time limit and simply giving up. That said, power users and people who are intentionally shooting short-form video will find the service a joy.

In the future I expect Flickr to lift the size and length restrictions entirely. In my chat with Srivastava, she had alluded to as much. The company also plans to let free users upload videos later on when the platform matures.

Various specs can be found after the break. See also News.com photo guru Stephen Shankland's post on it.

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