This is all over the web, and I just wanted to share my thoughts on this. I think Flickr should have extended to video a while ago, but I very much think this is a good thing. Myself and many others are sick of the poor quality we find on Youtube, and quite frankly, there aren’t any good high definition replacements.
We did have Stage6 for a while, but that didn’t turn out good in the end. It was really a shame that they had to close down. The bandwidth costs of managing a huge HD video sharing website are huge, and we know that youtube, with its shitty quality pays millions and millions of dollars a month (due to an estimate done over a year ago) and drains hundreds of petabytes down the tubes monthly. The costs of maintaining such a service in HD is likely to double or even triple the bandwidth costs.
The only reliable, user friendly, cool HD video sharing website at this point in time is Vimeo, which has developed a strong community, although not as strong as say digg.com.
Getting to my point, for Flickr, doing HD video would be fantastic because being owned by Yahoo, they would have little problem paying those bandwidth bills and already have a strong community and extensive user base. So all in all, I’m super excited for the beta this April. Details on when the Gamma and “Loves You” milestones come out were not released.
