I have come full circle in the world of online video sharing. I started with vSocial, and have used YouTube, blip, Veoh, Brightcove, and Vimeo, which is clearly the best of the bunch. (I have also fooled with converting to flash video myself, and hosting the videos on my own server using an open-source flv player, and I still do for my very large video files.) I plan on staying with Vimeo for the foreseeable future. I have also looked at all other video sharing startups as they have come online (note: most of them suck), and I have held a reservation for the long-awaited Flickr video, which is such a natural progression from photographs.
A lot of uneducated commenters suggest that Flickr needs to compete with YouTube, and I hope it doesn't. If I had pirated video of The Daily Show, then yes, I would post them to YouTube. What Flickr for videos needs to be is just like what Flickr is for photographs. Flickr is not a collection of every random photo on the internet, but a utility for people to share their personal photographs. I think Flickr (and in a sense, Yahoo!, their parent) understands the difference.
There is a rumor that the bulk of the video services offered by Flickr will be available to pro account holders. That is fine by me, since I am one. In fact, this would be a wise business decision. The nominal fee (something like $25 annually) is hardly something to balk at, especially when people are spending upwards of $40 or $50 to connect to the internet, every month.
My outstanding issues are going to be with video restrictions.
Will Flickr limit video length? Some say videos may need to be three minutes or less. That could be a limit for non-pro users, but pro account holders should have unlimited video length time, or at least a limit that is effectively limitless, say 10 or 15 minutes. Most personal videos will meet that criterion.
More importantly, will Flickr video limit videos based on file size? Most file sharing sites restrict videos to some level, usually 100 or 150 megs. That would be disastrous to me if Flickr carries that thinking forward.
Cameras are now offering more and more quality, with the cost being file size. For example, my camera requires 100 megabytes for every minute of video. If Flickr restricts uploads to a hard-and-fast 100mb limit, I will not be able to upload many of my higher-quality videos without first exporting them to lower quality, a step that will reduce the likelihood that I will upload my videos to Flickr (or any site for that matter).
A more appropriate requirement for Flickr to make is that a pro account holder is limited to 1 or 2 gigabytes of video uploads total per month, regardless of individual file sizes. This is similar to what Vimeo does, currently limiting all users (there are no fees or pro accounts) to 500mb per month.
Since the prevailing thought in Silicon Valley and the internet industry is that bandwidth is increasingly the more limiting resource, and not overall storage, limiting overall uploads per month is the method to pursue.
Lastly, I hope the Flickr video player is not obtrusive, is embeddable, allows for a multitude of sharing options (read: privacy controls), and does not have a Flickr logo overlay. (I won't hold my breath on that last one.) If Flickr does screw this up, and they may certainly do that, I would rather stay with Vimeo then spend time and effort trying to make Flickr video work. If Flickr succeeds, they will easily have the best one-stop solution for personal sharing on the internet.
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