Flickr Video

Sure, most of you already know this. Flickr has added video to their service. It's 90 seconds long at max. A long photo.

I understand the idea (Flickr doesn't want to become the next YouTube or the next Blip.tv) and like it. However there are a couple of things I noticed since it was released last week.

Embedding: the option to choose for attribution

When embedding a video, Flickr gives you an option to "Show the video's title and owner at the start". This is an option on Creative Commons licensed video's as well. I find this strange because attribution should be given for ALL CC licensed material, so why didn't they make this an option ONLY for "All rights reserved" material? It should be grayed out for CC licensed material. Attribution is a must and without it any creator is lost in the digital jungle.

Show me your license

When reusing CC material you should ALWAYS make clear which license is being used. Flickr Video doesn't have an option for this. You might say: but it doesn't do that for photo's as well. Indeed, but with video's there's a way to do that easily, for example: add the license details to the name text at the beginning of the video. Using the CC symbols would be perfect.

Creative Commons: take action!

In my opinion Creative Commons should write Flickr a small email and solve those problems. Attribution and pointing out which license is used are a MUST, people are super lazy, so that stuff should be build in with the player.

If Flickr changes those features, they have a great Video service and when someone wants to embed it on his/her own blog, nothing more than a bit of copying and pasting has to be done. People like that. They call it easy of use.

Lastly: bad audio and weird urls

I noticed very bad audio quality in the Videos the last couple of days, but I get the impression this has been improved somewhat. Great!

But I have also noticed that Flickr doesn't offer special urls for these Videos. The Video shown above is under http://flickr.com/photos/raaphorst/2408509800/ Indeed, it has the word photos in the url. Flickr used to be very good in choosing the right naming conventions and that sort of stuff, but this doesn't make sense to me. It's maybe a small thing but I felt like Flickr had some problems to integrate Video into their service and it feels a little strange.

Update: I also noticed that Flickr has forgotten parameters for transparency under Flash (value="transparent" & wmode="transparent") which causes other objects which should be shown on top of it (using Lightbox for example) to appear underneath the video. Flickr should fix this, because most people won't be able to fix that code themselves.