Archival Footage

October 2006

The industry’s collective
memory faces the future.

By Peter Caranicas

The world’s appetite for
stock and archival footage seems insatiable. Growing globalization, concern
about today’s dangerous political climate, alarm over natural disasters—not
to mention the proliferation of television channels in recent years and now the
sudden emergence of video on the Internet and on portable devices—have
all contributed to an increased demand for moving images depicting everything
from Al Qaeda training camps to South Asia’s tsunami devastation to historical
recordings of pre-Katrina New Orleans.

Yet, even as the
archival-footage business rises to the occasion and improves its customers’
ability to search through its vast resources, it faces a daunting dual task:
digitizing its assets and preparing for a future when most broadcasters will
demand high-definition imagery.

In this high-stakes
environment, scale is important, and the footage industry has undergone waves
of consolidation over the past several years, leading to the emergence of
several large organizations that not only own their own vast libraries, but
also represent several other collections, enabling re-searchers, broadcasters,
producers, ad agencies and other users often to go to a single source to fill
their needs.

Reuters saw the writing on
the wall back in 1992. “We took the decision that, rather than managing our own
stock and running our own video-archive business, we would transfer the library
to ITN, who merged it with their own archive and that of other partners,” says
Tony Donovan, Reuters’ managing director of television.

In a business model that
is now the norm in the stock business, ITN Archive (now ITN Source) took
responsibility for the physical management and storage of Reuters’ stock, as
well as global sales and marketing activity. Reuters continues to own the
footage—it’s one of the world’s oldest news archives, with material that
dates back to 1896 and covers every significant international news event from
the past 110 years—and shares in the revenues from its exploitation.

However, one-stop shopping
is not the only impetus toward consolidation. Footage companies need formidable
financial resources in order to digitize their assets for today’s increasingly
web-based, multi-format world.

“We’re in the process of
digitizing a lot of content and have over 100,000 clips online now,” says Lewis
Blackwell, the senior VP and group creative director of Getty Images. Getty,
one of the majors of the stock business, owns many collections on an exclusive
basis and represents several others non-exclusively. “Our aim is to aggregate
everything into one place where you can go and get the content,” Blackwell
adds. Getty customers include major networks all over the world, which the
company serves through 20 wholly owned offices in major cities as well as
through several independent reps.

National Geographic
Digital Motion, National Geographic’s footage unit, the owner of a collection
consisting of over 100,000 hours of material, is also in the process of digitizing
its entire library.

“The collection is so big
that we can’t even put a number on it until it all gets digitized,” says
Jocelyn Shearer, National Geographic Digital Motion’s VP of worldwide sales. “It’s
a massive undertaking. The hardest part was setting it up and figuring out the
work flow. That has been done and now we’re churning through it. We’re starting
with the most marketable material and the most recent material.”

Jeff Goodman, the owner
and president of Producers Library Service—which specializes in Hollywood
and entertainment history as well as footage and outtakes from films and TV
shows—is another archive executive in the throes of digitization. “We
have at least 10,000 hours on video and 15 million feet of film that will be
converted,” he says.

According to Goodman, 50
percent of Producers Library’s sales are to documentary production. The History
Channel, the BBC and Discovery Communications are among the networks where the
footage has found a home. Sales have been helped by the fact that documentaries
are enjoying a resurgence in popularity—a trend, he says, that was partly
spurred by the success in 2004 of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

What’s
In Demand?

“Every time there’s an
anniversary—JFK’s death, Elvis’s death, Hurricane Katrina—people
like to look back to see what we can learn from those events or how information
about those events has changed over the years,” says Jan Ross, the senior VP of
BBC Motion Gallery. “We’re a great source for that.” BBC Motion Gallery, a
division within BBC Worldwide, is the source for clip licensing from the BBC
and other providers dating back 75 years.

“The footage requests that
we get are very much linked to what is happening around the world,” agrees Véronique
Foucault, the head of sales and operations at AP Archive. “If there is another
devastating hurricane in America, or if a famous—or infamous—world
leader passes away, or if a war breaks out in the Middle East, first news
programs and later documentaries about them will be made, and producers will come
to us for the recent archive material. They know that AP will have covered
those news stories.”

AP Archive has a vast
library of international news footage, and, through partnerships, also provides
access to material from companies like ABC Australia and CCTV China. Like the
Reuters collection, it dates back to 1896 and includes material from all major
wars, political and historic events, and disasters, as well as entertainment
and celebrity footage. Major customers include the BBC, for programs like Panorama
and news specials; producers for
Discovery, National Geographic and A&E; the factual departments of
broadcasters and production companies; documentary-makers; and producers of
entertainment programs and reality shows.

“Often there is a
connection between recent events and looking back at something that directly
relates to that,” says Lee Shoulders, the director of archival film content at
Getty Images. “For example, Hurricane Katrina brought on more requests for
historical New Orleans footage, and also caused renewed interest in material
relating to ecological issues.”

“We’ve seen many requests
for material related to terrorism,” says Alison Smith, the associate director
for research and stock sales at the WGBH Media Library, the footage-licensing
unit of Boston’s public-television station. “We’re licensing a lot of footage
related to the Middle East. Demand for that has gone up.” WGBH’s footage has
found its way to broadcasters worldwide, including the BBC, A&E, The
History Channel, NHK and ZDF.

“A lot of documentaries
are made around anniversaries of key political events, key terrorist events,
and so on,” reiterates Sue Thexton, the managing director of ITN Source. “But
on the counter side of that, we’ve seen a surge in requests for footage of
celebrities. There’s a large public demand for that.” Indeed, a picture of
Paris Hilton has been featured front and center on the home page of ITN Sources’s
website.

ITN Source, one of ITN’s
many divisions, is the company’s commercial exploiter of video content and has
signed representation deals for news and programming with several organizations
like the previously mentioned Reuters, British Pathe, Fox Movietone and
Granada. As such, it provides moving images through its worldwide organization
to producers, ad agencies and broadcast clients that are looking for clips to
complete their projects.

The rates for footage
licensing are being buffeted by numerous and often contradictory trends.
National Geographic’s Shearer finds that prices paid for footage are tending to
drop, which, she believes, can actually be advantageous for a large, well-known
library. “Producers are experiencing downward pressure on their individual
budgets, because outlets for content have fractured and multiplied,” she says. “But
in a way that’s a good thing for preexisting content. As budgets go down,
original production becomes more untenable and we have more opportunities to
use material that’s been around—repackaged and repurposed in a fresh way.”

PRICE MATTERS

But that point has not yet
been reached. “There are still enough traditional media around that the price
model hasn’t been completely revamped yet,” Shearer adds, “but I don’t think it
will remain status quo. Everybody will have to adjust.”

“It’s a complex market
now, and price is an incredibly complex subject,” says ITN Source’s Thexton. “Lots
of companies are waking up to the commercial opportunities out there. Yet as
more advertisers move to other platforms, broadcast ad revenues decline and
programming budgets decline. That means the budgets available for archival
footage become smaller, so it puts pressure on everyone, including ourselves.”

ITN prefers to hold the
line in this downward pressure with a modified you-get-what-you-pay-for
approach. “One of things we’re proud of is our ability to service a customer
and get them the exact footage that they need, and that has a price attached to
it,” says Thexton. “So in many respects we’re able to maintain pricing while at
the same time addressing our customers’ needs.”

Thexton adds that ITN is
about to launch a new pricing model that “we hope will sort it out for a lot of
people.” The new scheme will base prices on several parameters, including, says
Thexton, “what country it will be shown in, how many times it will be shown,
whether the customer wants it to have Internet play as well as television, the
length of the clip, how long it will be licensed for, and so forth. All those
things are very different, and we want to come up with a system that’s much
simpler.”

Getty Images’ Blackwell sees
more flexibility in footage pricing rather than any clear-cut trends upward or
downward. “We’ll have more types of pricing points,” he says, “because we have
a wider range of customers that want a wider range of things. Some material
will be very affordable at a modest price with small usage, but there will also
be cases of big usage, global customers who want to buy something and put it
everywhere. So on one level, customers are looking for bigger things to do with
content, on another level they’re getting more fragmented and have much smaller
budgets to work with.”

Royalty-Free
Vs. Rights-Managed

Two revenue models exist
in stock footage licensing: royalty-free, whereby customers license material
outright for their own use in exchange for a one-time fee; and rights-managed,
where the terms of use for the licensed footage are spelled out in considerable
detail.

In general, royalty-free
licensing, which is lower in cost, applies to more commonly available footage,
or what Producers Library’s Goodman calls “common-denominator images that
people use day in and day out, like the American flag, a hippie flashing a
peace sign, a jet in the sky—it’s like clip art.”

Rights-managed licensing
is used for “premium,” harder-to-find material and often includes certain
exclusivity provisions. “It might be a clip that you get to use in just one
show,” Goodman explains, “and you can’t use it anywhere else unless you pay
again. You only get certain rights.”

“Royalty-free and
managed-rights are two different philosophies,” Goodman adds. “People who just
do managed-rights licensing do not always appreciate the royalty-free companies
that put stuff on a DVD and throw it out there. It may benefit the end user but
it does not benefit the stock companies.”

“Royalty-free versus rights-managed
is a double-edged sword,” says National Geographic’s Shearer. “There’s nothing
wrong with the royalty-free concept. It’s a great price point for a lot of
people, and with it you can pick up part of the marketplace that you couldn’t
with rights-managed footage. But if you have sensitive content, or content that
has certain restrictions around it based on the way it was captured, or based
on what is captured, then you have to leave it squarely in the rights-managed
camp so that you can make sure you’re not contravening any agreements or
content issues.”

The type of material
appropriate for royalty-free licensing and for rights-managed licensing is
changing, according to Getty Images’ Blackwell. “There’s a growing range of
users,” he says. “In the past there was the idea that rights-managed footage
was more premium content and royalty-free was more narrowly elemental content.
That’s changing.”

As the entire world moves
toward high-definition broadcasting and HD video consumption, there’s
increasing pressure on stock and archival footage companies to make their
material available on the higher-resolution format. This is easier said than
done. While practically all new material is now acquired on HD, much of the
older material resides on standard-definition (SD) tape, or on film. SD can be
up-converted to HD but it can never fully achieve the format’s clarity. Film
can be converted to HD with good results, but at a cost.

The
HD Dilemma

Reuters’ Donovan points
out that “very little news content is acquired on HD. ITN have been
up-converting some key older stories, but even now, very little news material
is covered using HD cameras. The very high costs of satellite delivery for HD
and the immediacy of need for news coverage keeps the cost prohibitive.” Donovan
adds that the real drivers toward HD production are sports and documentaries.

Yet people are demanding
HD, even in news, says Jessica Berman-Bogdan, the president of Global
ImageWorks. “They’ll say, ‘I need 9/11 footage in HD, or I need Iraq on HD,’” she
observes. “Well, that footage doesn’t exist. In 2003 there was no down-and-easy
HD camera for shooting war footage. Now that there is, more and more such
footage will be shot in HD.”

Material originally
captured on film has an advantage over footage shot on standard-definition
video since film, even in its 16mm format, has a resolution as high as HD and
yields a good picture when transferred to high-def tape. But the problem of
transferring original film material to HD is the cost. “Unless you have a huge
budget and can transfer it all to HD, it’s done on a case-by-case basis,”
Berman-Bogdan explains. “We’ve identified which material we’d like to do that
with.”

But the future is
definitely moving in the direction of HD. “We have more and more material available
in HD,” says the BBC’s Ross, “and the BBC is looking to produce everything in
HD by 2010. It is a top priority in terms of both broadcasting and production.”

In addition to HD, the
emergence of the Internet has had a gigantic impact on the footage business—both
in terms of online research and online distribution.

One of the most
progressive players in this arena is Thought Equity, which has signed exclusive
online representation deals with a number of rights holders, including National
Geographic, and makes their material searchable and downloadable via broadband.
The company digitizes others’ footage and stores it on its own servers.

“Our goal has been to
provide a better user experience through technical superiority, and also to
create real-time search, preview and delivery of every file,” says Thought
Equity’s CEO, Kevin Schaff. “If you come to our site you can view and find
footage about 12 times faster than on any other site. We’ve invented a patented
technology called Speed View. The minute you click on the search result, the
clip plays full motion on the screen.”

The playback is a small
preview file. Its digital master is stored on Thought Equity’s servers and is
available for downloading in high resolution. While downloading a large,
high-resolution file can take up to an hour, “when you really need a piece of
imagery to complete your project, it’s still a lot faster than FedEx,” note
Schaff. “Plus, we will do transcoding on demand. You can get it in PAL, NTSC,
another resolution, and so on. We do all that work on our servers.”

Taking a big-picture view,
Getty Images’ Blackwell says that footage licensing over the past few years has
been driven by what he calls “a quest for authenticity” and a need for recent,
real-world material. “Archival content used to refer to a more distant past, to
big events from earlier in the century, or the past century,” he observes. “In
the last five years, there’s been a trend toward wanting footage of events like
Iraq and Katrina—footage that is archival but more recent.”

Others foresee business
trends that will thrust the footage industry in the direction of online
licensing and catering to consumer demand. “We’ll see people expecting to get
things for very little money,” says the BBC’s Ross. “It’s part of the new sense
of community that we find in places like MySpace and Google.”

Ross does not consider
this a negative trend. “The only area where it gets tricky is making sure—like
in music—that the people who use the footage understand the copyright
issues,” she says. “Just because you paid for something doesn’t mean you own
it.”

Reuters’ Donovan also sees
a trend toward what he calls “consumer-facing archive products.” He explains
that “the archive business has
largely been a wholesale business, with content purchased by program makers.
Now with broadband penetration increasing, the scope for us to use our archive
footage to develop online experiences for audiences directly—rather than
through other entities—grows by the day. I can see us using our website,
interactive TV platforms, wireless platforms and other services that go
straight to consumers as vehicles to deliver archive content and monetize the
stock we hold in new ways.”

Thought Equity, ITN and
others are testing the new-media waters through an agreement with Google Video.
“Google doesn’t allow for lic-­ensing or transactions,” says Schaff, “nor do they
allow for our clips to be syndicated or integrated into other sites from their
site, but it does allow people to come in and use Google as a search engine to
view different clips we have available.”

What has been learned so
far? It’s a bit early to tell. “The Google visitors are interested in our more
quirky shots,” observes ITN Source’s Thexton. “One of the most popular pieces
is beluga whales blowing bubbles in the water, like smoke rings.”

Evanescent smoke rings
that, so far, shed little light on the industry’s future.