Web videos are a quickly growing online trend. It is the beginning of new era on the internet as the entertainment industry is now embracing the web. The idea of watching popular TV shows and your favorite movies anytime and at no cost is simply amazing. Chatting with friends on IM, sharing something interesting on social networking sites and watching television online is the real web entertainment experience. The emerging online video services have made it possible. A few of the popular online video services are YouTube, Flickr and Hulu. It is being said that Hulu is the best video service out there. How can a newly developed service outclass other famous services like YouTube and Flickr? Let’s figure it out!
“Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”
Flickr is a famous image and video hosting network, which has been operational since 2004. Flickr is a Yahoo! service and is one of the earliest web 2.0 applications. It is a complete online community platform and the most preferred photo repository for bloggers. In November 2007, it claimed to host more than 2 billion images. Flickr started as FlickrLive to exchange real-time photos and became a great photo sharing site featuring organization of photos through tagging, privacy and security, interaction, compatibility and filtering and licensing of photos.
Organization of photos through tags helps to arrange photos categorically and makes searching convenient and efficient. Social networking is another popular aspect of Flickr. Although Flickr focuses on photo sharing, it has also started to provide support for videos using paid subscription. Paid subscribers can now upload videos limited to 90 seconds and 150MB in size.
“Find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how you want it.”
Hulu is a ‘video on demand’ web service, founded by NBC Universal and News Corp in 2007. The site offers free, ad-supported videos of popular television shows, movies and clips played in Flash Video format. Hulu covers programs from the famous TV channels including NBC, Fox, Comedy Central, PBS, SPEED Channel and Bravo, to name a few. According to hulu.com,
“Users can choose from more than 850 current primetime TV hits such as The Simpsons, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The A Team, Airwolf and Married…with Children, movies like Men in Black, Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid and clips from Saturday Night Live, Friends and other popular TV shows and movies.”
Hulu also provides web syndication services for other websites including AOL, MSN, MySpace, Yahoo! and Comcast’s Fancast.com. The movie content is provided by Universal Pictures, MGM and Sony Pictures studios. Hulu also features social networking. It allows users to create video clips to post in other online communities. Currently, this service is available for US residents only.
Flickr vs. Hulu – Are They Competitors?
I think they are NOT! Flickr and Hulu offer different services to their users. Flickr is an image hosting site that focuses on photo sharing. Hulu offers videos of popular television shows and movies to watch online. Hulu does not let users share videos, nor does it allow people to upload their personal videos on the site. Although Flickr allows users to upload videos, it is a paid service and offers limited functionality. With this limited feature, Flickr is not in a position to compete with Hulu.
Online video advertising has become another marketing trend that is gaining popularity. This is the field where Hulu is dominating while Flickr has barely touched it. Chris B. Allen, director of video innovation at Starcom told Forbes , “Most of the momentum now is for ads within full episodes run on the TV networks’ sites, such as NBC and Fox’s Hulu, ABC.com and CBS.com. It’s a format that advertisers understand.” So, in my opinion there is no comparison between Flickr and Hulu. Hulu is offering many more professional services than Flickr when it comes to the online video service domain.
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Related posts:
- Where to Find the Best Pictures for Your Blog Posts
- Flickr: A Hot Social Networking Site
- Flock – The Social Web Browser
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