Yahoo Launches Video On Flickr

Flickr members can now upload video to the popular photo-sharing site.

Yahoo launched video-sharing this week. Flickr boasts 42 million visitors a month. The company said it hopes the feature will help attain Yahoo's goal of being Internet users' main starting point on the Web.

Flickr will make video available in eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese.

Users can upload up to 90 seconds of footage, with a maximum size of 150 MB, from any recording device. They can organize and share videos the same way they handle photos, using tags, geotags, sets, and privacy settings. Videos can be uploaded to photo streams, alongside photos, and embedded on third-party Web sites.

Members can search videos by tags and descriptions and view them on full screens. Creators can mark videos with "All Rights Reserved" or designate a license through Creative Commons. Third-party developers can use an application programming interface to create programs or services using authorized video submitted to Flickr.

A Flickr team and community members will moderate video to spot abuse, Yahoo said.

"Video on Flickr is an extension of what Flickr is already doing with more than 2 billion photos worldwide -- providing a place where people capture and share life's daily moments," Kakul Srivastava, general manager of Flickr at Yahoo, said in a news announcement. "Digital media has led to a new behavior emerging in the market, and people are much more likely to shoot short video clips, essentially "long photos," with their digital still cameras and mobile phones. There is a great resonance between this new category of content and with the kind of authentic, personal moments already being shared on Flickr."

Yahoo commissioned a survey of more than 2,000 Internet users for four days in February and found that more than 40% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 44 record video clips with their digital cameras. Only 55% of respondents said they just play video clips on their cameras or PCs for friends, and 20% don't share them at all.