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Flickr video beta

Flickr video beta due in April.

Upon further investigation, it appears that “coming soon” means that Flickr Video will debut in beta next month. Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, defined the concept of photo sharing, but has been slow to extend the service into the video world. In the meantime, Google’s YouTube has become the primary destination for video sharing, capturing one out of every three of the online videos in the U.S.

Flickr Video will not replace Yahoo Video, unlike Yahoo Photos, which was folded into Flickr. The audience for Flickr is different. The term “authenticity” to convey the esprit de corps of the Flickr photo community, which numbers more than 23 million contributors.

Flickr has been a pure photo site since its inception. Adding video into the mix has to be done in a way acceptable to the community. In other words, launching a Video service primarily to compete more with YouTube would turn the community off. It has to appeal, in an “authentic” way, to the Flickr community.

While YouTube has a large share of market, video is growing fast on the Web. The problem for Yahoo is that many Flickr members, like myself, have gone to other places to share videos. Winning them back is going to be a challenge. We’ll find out next month if all the time spent figuring out how to bring video to Flickr has been worthwhile.

Posted in: Internet Back to top

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 4:30 am and is filed under Internet. 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.