Flickr doing Video?

Published 18 March 08 by Justin French

Via Mashable:

According to a dig by Dan Farber of CNET on the matter, Yahoo, working on the heels of very eager anticipation, is planning to deliver “Flickr Video” sometime in April.

I find this really interesting. Flickr has a massive, passionate, loyal community that have obviously embraced Flickr’s way of doing things.

Video feels like a natural progression for that community. A large percentage of them probably dabble in video already, and they’re probably using another service to host and share that content.

Most cameras do video, so it makes perfect sense — if you’re going to experiment with moving pictures, you may as well share it with your existing Flickr network of friends and fans.

The other interesting point is that YouTube (owned by Google) is clearly has the upper hand with video. Even searching for videos on Yahoo returns more YouTube results than Yahoo Video results (no scientific poll, of course), so Yahoo (owners of Flickr) may see some success leveraging Flickr’s community directly.

Above all else, I embrace the fact that Flickr had the discipline to go out there and solve one problem really well. Along the way they amassed a large community, built a platform, learnt a lot and helped define the space they’re in. They can take all this and apply it to video with ease.