Video in Flickr?

I doubt it's going to ruin Flickr or make it spammy: only Pro accounts can upload videos. All the MySpacers and such are not going to pay and be limited to 90 seconds on Flickr when they could just upload to YouTube or any of a dozen other sites for free. It's meant for video *art* or photo montages, and I think it will more or less stay in that realm.

Yeah, I was a little on the fence about the video. I just hope it doesn't turn into everyone posting videos of their favorite song because it works so well with a photo. I would like to see only original video.

^ I think the 90 second limitation will really help avoid things like that, because that's not long enough to put up a whole music video.

This will be perfect for augmenting photos. For example, if I were taking pictures of a fountain that had a cool pattern with several different jets of water firing at different times, I'd also want to take a short 30 second video and upload it with my pictures so that people could see the fountain in action.

I've really been of two minds about this, but the more I think about it the less it bothers me.

Flickr is really good at segmenting itself into self-regulated societies, and I think that in the end the only people that will be seeing those videos will be the ones that are interested in seeing them.

If one of my contacts goes crazy and starts putting up a bunch of Jack@$$ style videos that I'm not interested in, I'll just stop visiting their stream (although given the nature of my contacts i would be very surprised if that happened).

Eventually it will self-regulate and everyone will be happy.

My concern is that Flickr has a hard time keeping up with just photos.

It is sometimes painfully slow to browse photos, and they need to work on their image compression. I am sometimes forced to upload photos with larger dimensions because their compression kills the quality of the photo.

I can think of a lot better ways to enhance the site and Video wouldn't be my first choice, although I will probably end up enjoying it...hopefully.

I did notice that by default the setting is to play videos immediately. I shut that off in my privacy settings.

I also noticed that once you watch a video, then go back to that page, the video has to download all over again. I would like it to stay cached. hmm, I dunno. Maybe it all depends on the settings of the video shooter. If they don't allow downloading, then maybe it has to download every time.

We'll see. I am not going to complain until I have a chance to see how it really works and if it even affects me.