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Yahoo’s answer to Google’s YouTube, Flickr Video has been around for quite some time now. Although it has managed to gather some membership base and loyal followers, Flickr Video still couldn’t quite take off primarily because it was available to premium members only. Now, hoping to spruce up its services, Flickr Video is opening its services to everyone, plus introducing two other new features that aims to entice users to use Flickr Video instead of YouTube.First things first, Flickr Video gives free members two video upload limits per month which is in addition to their 100MB monthly photo upload limit. Now this may not be as popular as the unlimited video uploading feature of YouTube, but it’s good enough to use the service as way to share your personal videos to people that matter to you without needing to send the videos as email attachments.

Aside from opening up its video uploading service to everyone, Flickr Video is also riding on the popularity of HD videos by enabling HD video uploading and viewing. Whereas only PRO members can upload HD videos, the rest of the Flickr community can however view them. Now, it’s time for me to buy an HD Video camcorder.

The last new feature introduced by Flickr Video is the Flickr Clock. Flickr Clock displays videos according to the time they were taken. You can upload up to the minute videos and have viewed on the Flickr Clock Timeline. It’s like Twittering for videos, actually. You can see Flick Clock in action here.

Can these new features increase Flickr Video’s popularity and usage enough to give YouTube a run for its money? Hopefully. We all need an alternative for something so good as YouTube. But the problem with YouTube is that it is becoming to commercialized. Flickr Video is a good alternative. And these features are good ways to show the world that Yahoo is serious about Flickr video.

Here’s a sample of Flickr Video in HD quality.

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