Just this last weekend I bought a new digital camera (I lost my old one, along with the hospital pictures at the birth of my son). Renewing my interest in our photo library, I wanted to fire up my oldFlickr account and add some fresh content. Looking at my camera and playing with it’s video features got me thinking about why Flickr does not do video. “Flickr is just a photo sharing service, that’s our business” one might say. Oh really? Is it that, or is it a content sharing service for my digital camera? Consider for a moment the amount of Flickr content which is created with a digital camera. Well near all of it I’d say. Now ask yourself, how many of those devices can also capture video? Another astoundingly large percentage.
Following the user experience chain
There’s a phrase I’ve used in the past called ‘the user experience chain’. This means that for any given product, service, or thing, the user has an experience leading up to, and away from that item. To us as people, our experience is a continuous stream, yet businesses often think of the user experience only in terms of where their product begins and ends. In Flickr’s case, if you follow the user experience chain backwards to how the content is created, it inevitably leads you to the digital camera device. There I am snapping pictures, and also taking video, with the same device. The same amount of work is required for me to take the device, hook it up to my computer, download, categorize and store the content I created. Yet I can only store half of the content on Flickr. Missed opportunity? “But we’re only a photo sharing service!”. Perhaps. However to us you are what I do with the stuff I have on my camera. You are how I share it with my friends. That’s from our perspective. Expand what you do to help me with this entire experience, not just your limited mission statement. If not, then I have to go somewhere else to share the other half of my camera’s content.
UPS store gets it
Back in 2001 UPS bought the ailing Mail Boxes Ect. Since 2003 they have begun to convert them into ‘The UPS Store’. Initially they claimed this purchase was to capitalize on the growing need to return items purchased online and it gave them a nice ‘retail reach’ to the end consumer to do so. Reading a recent UPS press release on their site highlights the hidden advantage: UPS followed the chain of user experience for a segment of their customers. Now you can purchase the packaging supplies, have the professionals pack your stuff, and have it shipped all under one brand and in your own neighborhood. Fed Ex responded the same way by purchasing Kinko’s in 2004. “But they’re just shipping companies!”. Perhaps.
The Chicken or the Egg
So which is it? Do you consider Flickr a photo sharing service, or are they a service for your camera’s content? Do you focus on serving your customers in one task (sharing photos), or do you serve a lifestyle behavior (I capture life moments with digital devices)?
Published on December 16, 2005
Resides in User Experience, Web Technologies
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10 Responses to “Why Doesn’t Flickr Do Video?”
1
Damian on December 17th, 2005
Great Article… You make a valid point, one that I didn’t think of. However they can offer a fairly controlled environment with pictures. At least to some extent.
If they offer video hosting/posting they might have people using it for VLOGing and other uses. Not sure if that is a bad thing, but I could see some problems.
On the flip side, if they did host videos I would surely use it a decent amount.
2
Mark on December 17th, 2005
An interesting point, however I fall on the “it’s a photo sharing site, not a digital-media sharing site” side of the argument. And I guess if Flickr continues to just be a photo-sharing site, then there’s another market for someone (perhaps Yahoo!?) to branch out in.
3
Jameson Hsu on December 17th, 2005
They actually may be getting into the video arena. Check out the last clip in this CNET article.
http://news.com.com/Shedding+light+on+Flickr/2100-1025_3-5997943.html?tag=st.txt.caro
4
argo on December 18th, 2005
It’s a quite reasonable request. Though from my point of view, it’s like mixing apples with oranges. Both photos and videos are media, people create them, why not have them on the same site?
Well, the technology to handle each is different. A photo (usually a jpg) gets downloaded to your cache. Usually video sites stream the content, don’t let you download it. Also, with photos, it’s a bit easier to manipulate them: create thumbnails, different sizes, reduce quality, rotate, crop, etc. It’s a bit more limited what you can do with video edition online.
Also, while photos are reduced to 3 main types: png, jpg, gif (and i think flickr lets you upload jpg and gif only, right?), while video can be generated in so many different formats: avi, mov, divx, wmv, mp4, mpeg, etc. And I’m not sure, but I guess some cameras might generate their own type of video, or maybe their own version of a format.
Though they might have the infrastructure, you have to consider that the bandwith increase would be enourmous. A really big photo can be like what? 1, 2 megas? make it bigger, but flickr resizes it, and displays by default a smaller version (and gives you the option to see all sizes). So, the default size of a photo is what? 300kb? Video is usually a lot bigger. An if you’d like to share it, or keep in flickr, you’d like to keep its quality right? if flickr lets you upload, but to stream it, it gets converted, compressed, and loses quality, you wouldn’t like that.
Also, keep into account the way they handle content. They ask you to tag your photos. Tagging an image is easy, you can describe it with words. Videos, for being a sequence of images, get harder to tag, and less precise. While you could tag a photo as “green” or “beautiful”, refering to the main subject of it, with a video gets much difficult: “green”, but where (when actually, where in the timeline).
Another thing, which I love: the flickr api. What if suddenly they mixed the photo content with videos, wouldn’t the api break? you have an application that gets your content and display it in a certain way (say in flash), then suddenly a video comes, your app. can’t handle that. Either they’d give tools to filter between videos and photos, or the developers using the api would need to update the code.
My personal opinion is that there’s also more people creating good quality photos than there’s people creating good quality video. Also, while all photo cameras take photos, not all of them take video. Also, not everybody is sharing photos with the family or friends, There’s flickr users like artists or fashion photographers who just don’t care about video. My point is, while in flickr everybody is interested in photography, not everybody is interesting in video. So it’s not a matter of just keep adding services if they are not getting used completelly.
They probably have the infrastructure, but I’d say they shouldn’t mix photos with video. Why not just make a sister site that has the same concept of flickr, but handles video only? That’s be much better, and probably at some point yahoo could do it, or buy some of the services that are getting popular in that area.
5
hynes on December 23rd, 2005
I imagine Flickr, like Apple & Google, are already looking into how to grow their brand. And if they’re not, well they don’t deserve to be in business.
The same thing could be said of the iPod. Who would have thought two years ago that Apple would be selling an iPod with video. The scenes too small. Who would pay for that? But they did it anyway because they saw the market heading that way. They morphed a “music-playing device” into a “music+photos playing device” to a “total media” device with music, photos, and video.
Great thoughts!
6
ryan on December 23rd, 2005
Hynes: Exactly. It’s pretty likely all the big players will. Good point about the iPod. Similar in concept just the reverse…I can view photos…now why not video? One thing we consumer are consistent about, and that’s demanding more!
Argo: I agree, you brought up just about every cost/technology reason why they haven’t or why lesser companies may sit around and say ‘no’. But that’s also the point of my post. That line of thinking is thinking about the business first and not about serving user needs and behaviors. (other than the photographers you mentioned
) Only Flickr really knows if its a good move or not for them, but in general the post is about companies thinking outside their own proverbial box so-to-speak.
7
Denis on January 7th, 2006
Perhaps they will succumb to become FlickVid.
8
Greg Cannon on January 20th, 2006
Flickr’s content is also text. Wouldn’t be the same without comments and notes.
9
insider on January 22nd, 2006
as someone who works at a flickr video competitor: yes, flickr is already expanding into video. hopefully they will take too long and you’ll want to use our service instead.
10
Daniel Nicolas on April 24th, 2006
I’m opposed to flickr having video. I’d rather have my photos and videos separate. So much of the “YouTube” experience revolves around the fact that it’s a completely different crowd. While there are the stinkers in every crowd, I’d argue that Flickr is a more controlled environment with less room for people to trash the system.
But I think if anyone could pull off a social experience with video, it would be the flickr team. Flickr is a social experience and so far, no one, no one has pulled off anything worth using.