In the past four years, Flickr has really stood out as a photo sharing site with a great community of users who have uploaded 2 billion+ photos. Three years after being acquired by Yahoo, on their fourth anniversary, the word is out that Flickr will add videos “very soon”.
Back in May 2007, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield was the first to reveal that they are working on videos, and users would be able to see it in action “soon”. This was later reconfirmed by Yahoo Video General Manager, Mike Folgner. If reports from News.com are true, then we’ll finally be able to upload our videos to Flickr as early as 14 days from now.
Flickr Video isn’t replacing Yahoo Video, unlike Yahoo Photos, which was wrapped into Flickr. In fact, the target audience for Yahoo Video and Flickr is different. Yahoo Video is for more refined or professionally produced videos, and Flickr Video would probably be more community centric.
Most cameras are capable of capturing videos along with photos, so it makes perfect sense for Flickr to add a video section. As a devoted Flickr Pro user, I’ve come across many occasions where I had to turn to YouTube for my videos. It has been a long time, and Flickr Team had ample time to work out something better than YouTube. Let’s wait and see if Flickr Video was worth the wait.

wrote, on March 18th, 2008
What exactly do they mean by “working on videos”? How difficult is it to get something like this would be fairly easy to host, subject to a staggering storage capacity.
No doubt YouTube is safe for a while yet !
wrote, on March 18th, 2008
This will be a great addition to an already cool site. I think that the videos will benefit Flickr well.
wrote, on March 19th, 2008
Steve Elliott: Maybe, they want their video site to be something more than YouTube, which is why they are taking so long.
wrote, on March 23rd, 2008
yep youtube could be in trouble, i for one, will switch to a program that can host both videos and images
wrote, on March 26th, 2008
On one hand, this sounds really cool, but I really hope Flickr doesn’t end up cluttered with pictures of people doing skateboard tricks and making really awful sketch comedy.