Flickr gets video, but for 'pro' members only

Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing site has added the ability for users to upload videos to their photo collections, but only if they're "pros."

Flickr users paying $24.95 a year for the Pro account upgrade have gotten the additional privilege of uploading their videos to the site. Videos must be under 90 seconds in length and under 150 MB in size to be converted to Flash and hosted on Flickr. Acceptable original formats include AVI, WMV, MOV, MPEG1, 2, and 4, and 3Gp, with various proprietary codecs unconfirmed.

The number of users with Pro accounts versus Free accounts appears to not be public information, but estimates based upon the number of photos available on Flickr, the number of users, and the limits on free accounts suggest the percentage is still modest. In November 2007, the site confirmed it had reached 2 billion images uploaded.

Rules regarding video content that may be uploaded are currently a bit more specific on Flickr than they are on YouTube, as the site's original intent was for videos to behave like "long photos."

Under Flickr's system that was updated early last summer, users must label their content as being Safe, Moderate, and Unsafe according to a global, public standard of acceptability. Then, by judging how appropriately the user has tagged and categorized his photos, and how well he adheres to the site's code of conduct, his account gets similarly flagged. Users who are good at self-moderation get Safe and Moderate flags, while users who haven't been so careful get flagged as Unsafe.

At the time this system went live, it immediately spurred controversy, as some construed the tightening regulations as nascent censorship. To add to the controversy, users based out of Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, and Germany had additional local terms of service added into their account guidelines. In Germany, restricted content was made entirely un-viewable, and in the others, SafeSearch could not be turned off.