Dear flickr, please do video…
Although Techcrunch has highlighted a number of interesting video-oriented sharing sites in the web2.0 arena none of them are really all that compelling. I’ve tried both JumpCut and MotionBox and although it’s nice to have a place to share videos from my “still” camera it still doesn’t feel like a fluid experience on either site. Both of these sites offer online editing and “mashup capability” but the problem is that I don’t care. All I want is a nice interface to share videos of Sebastian (my 1 year old) walking for the first time. I use my regular camera for videos a lot now because dragging out my miniDV camera for anything but long-ish engagements is just a PITA. (And I love that iMovie makes things nice and fast, but I only pull that out if I want to author up a DVD.) Additionally, the 100MB, while not something you may run into a lot can be a problem. What I really want is to have flickr’s interface adapted for video. Beyond that, an export plugin for iPhoto (like the current flickrExport - which kicks major ass) would seal the deal. Uploading video through a browser sucks. And it was hard enough to find the locations of the video files that had already been organized by iPhoto (thank goodness for Spotlight) so having an exporter would really provide a seamless way to get things done. (And while we’re at it, Broadband upload speeds suck…but you already knew that.)
So…why aren’t there any open source video sharing platforms? Every programming language has a few “photo gallery” type packages available for them. Gallery is certainly popular (php) and rails has Gullery. So where are all the video gallery projects? A cursory check on google, sourceforge, and freshmeat yield next to nothing…hrmmm…