Yahoo's Answer to YouTube

Flickr, the well known photo sharing site, has announced that it will begin offering video Streaming in an effort to rival the dominant market leader, YouTube.

Flickr to add video streaming

Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!, made the announcement today but with a hitch. Movies will be Limited to only 90 seconds long and 150 MB in size. The movies will be shown as thumbnails next to user's uploaded photos.

All Flickr visitors "will be access all of the tools for videos that they can currently for photos - namely users can add comments, captions, comments, geotags, and privacy restrictions so only friends or family may view their videos." The videos can also be embedded on other sites.

Flickr's staff said the new decision was based on the fact that an increasing number of digital cameras and DSLRs offer video recording. Although it will now offer video streaming, the company insists it does not want to be the next YouTube and instead wants a more personal touch for friends and family to upload short movies.

"People aren't using YouTube to share their personal short-form video clips", said a Flickr spokesperson.

"Ninety seconds helps us define that rebroadcasting commercial content is not what this site is for", added Neilson.

The only other hitches are that only "pro" subscribers will have the ability to add videos and the site only supports AVI, MPEG, and MOV formats.

YouTube Video Usage Analytics

YouTube account holders now have the ability to check usage statistics for the videos they upload.


YouTube Rolls Out Usage Analytics

YouTube account holders will now be able to access usage statistics for the videos they upload, such as where viewers are geographically located and how they found the clips.

The feature, called YouTube Insight, had been in high demand from partners that use the video-sharing site to market their products and services and, as such, want detailed metrics to determine the efficacy of their YouTube campaigns.

The announcement, made early Thursday, wasn't a complete surprise. Earlier this month, YouTube sales team manager Brian Cusack said that the Google unit was planning to provide its members with more data about video viewership.

"YouTube has enormous amounts of data, but not great reporting on that data yet," Cusack said during a keynote speech at the eRetailer Summit in Miami.

Now, marketers will have a better understanding of clips' reach and effectiveness at boosting brand awareness and sales, according to YouTube.

"With YouTube Insight, we've turned YouTube into one of the world's largest focus groups. Insight will help advertisers optimize their marketing efforts, determine how successful they were, and discover previously unknown marketing opportunities," an official YouTube blog posting reads.

The metrics will also give a better understanding of clips' popularity and viewership to people who upload videos for fun without commercial or marketing purposes.

YouTube Insight doesn't collect or display personally identifiable information on viewers, but rather provides uploaders with aggregated data on viewers' geographic location and on the time and day when clips were viewed, a Google spokesman said via e-mail. Google will "soon" turn a feature to let uploaders discover how viewers found a clip, such as via a Google search, browsing YouTube's "related videos" suggestions or clicking on an e-mail or Web site link, he said.