Stocking Up

October 2008

Two words that seem to go together in many people’s minds are “dusty” and “archives.”

Not surprisingly, the people who manage the busiest and best-known video archives don’t much like that association. They point out that purveyors of stock footage—another term they’re not crazy about—are doing far more than gathering dust.

They’re rapidly becoming major players in e-commerce, they’re starting new businesses, offering new services, cultivating new kinds of customers and, in several cases, they are shooting and producing new video.

Probably the biggest development across the business is in improved user-friendliness via the Internet. It’s becoming a given these days that customers should be able to do research online, preview low-resolution footage and buy and download high-res video without leaving their keyboards. Approaches differ from company to company, and some are further along than others, but access to digitized video is a key to the future of the business.

As one of the newer players in the business, five-year-old Thought Equity Motion, based in Denver, boasts one of the most thoroughly digitized archives, much of it from major Hollywood studios, NBC News, HBO Archives and the NCAA.

“Over the last several years, we’ve built the largest online library in the world,” says Kevin Schaff, the company’s founder and CEO. “An editor can come into our system, work with all of our material, download what they want low res into their editing system and then capture the master files of what they selected and deliver that back into the editing system in high res. It comes down to creating access. You can have all the content in the world, but if you don’t have access to it then it’s difficult to monetize it.”

ITN Source, with a million hours of news, history, politics, entertainment and sports footage in its archives, won’t ever be fully digitized, says Asha Oberoi, the company’s director of content, but it is upgrading its more commercially valuable material. “Digitization is essential to growth,” she says. “Once it’s digitized there is so much possibility—you can research it, find it, sell it again and again without incurring costs each time you sell the material. We have 500,000 clips that are all previewable and downloadable. Digitization also allows you to use the content in a variety of new ways. We’re creating niche databases and ring-fencing all our show-biz content, or all our sports or news content, to create various different databases.”

ITNsource.com uploads more than 500 clips a day, Oberoi says. “Our new online pricing model is 30 percent cheaper than our off-line pricing model, and we’ll be charging by the clip rather than by the second or minute,” she says.

Another huge news-oriented stock-footage supplier is AP Archive, and it, too, is digitizing methodically. Alwyn Lindsey, the head of video archives for the Associated Press, says
AP Archive started digitizing less than a year ago. “We have 2,000 hours of our video up already, and we’re adding about 10 hours a day,” he says. “Later in the year, we’ll be adding 30 hours a day. It’s having a good impact in that clients find it easier to find our footage. I don’t think any archive out there has digitized and seen a massive upturn in business immediately. We’re doing business with most of the people we could be doing business with right now. We’re making it easier for them, and it’s translating into some dollar upswing. It’ll probably take a good year before you see any benefit.”

KEEPING CUSTOMERS HAPPY

Right now AP is looking at subject matter likely to be in demand. “We’re going back, second-guessing the market,” Lindsey says. “Next year is the anniversary of Woodstock and the moon landings. We’re digitizing relevant material. We already had compilations of some of our greatest hits, grouped by various themes, on tape. We’ve digitized all of those. Today’s news will be in the archive tomorrow digitally. Going forward, it’s a matter of adding as much as you can.”

Like AP, National Geographic Digital Motion is not trying to digitize everything in its archive of travel, wildlife and cultural footage. “The majority of the more recent and most commercially desirable content has been digitized,” says Jocelyn Shearer, the VP of worldwide sales.

But the National Geographic archive is stopping short of the full e-commerce model, Shearer says. “You can search everything that’s digitized online and download low res, but you can’t just enter a credit-card number and take delivery of a high-res shot without talking to somebody. The nature of our content is that people often want to know more facts about it. If we found we were losing sales because they didn’t want to talk to anybody, then we would speed up that component.”

Some other, smaller, more boutique-like providers are going more slowly on developing the e-commerce model.

WGBH Stock Sales in Boston, for instance, relies on customer awareness of its own Nova science and Frontline current-events strands. “People come to us because they’ve seen our programs and they’re interested in the content they see,” says Alison Smith, who the associate director at WGBH Stock Sales. “That’s our best advertising. We’re not quite e-commerce; we still fulfill the old-fashioned way.”

WGBH has between 6,500 and 7,000 clips on its website now, which Smith calls “a pretty small percentage” of the library. “Our hope is to build up our online presence, and ultimately we’d like to offer more of an educational marketplace that might include graphics and maps and all the sort of stuff we have on our educational website now.”

WGBH, a major producing station for PBS, maintains its own library and deals in traditional customer service because many of its productions, like American Experience, are heavily dependent on material it has licensed from other archives.

“We shoot interviews and some recreations for American Experience, but we do buy stock footage,” Smith says. “People come to us more than anything else for Nova footage, science footage. Nova scienceNOW has a lot of shorter magazine pieces. A lot of people doing educational content for museums or other educational institutions come to us. Frontline is also a big seller, for current affairs.”

Global ImageWorks, a midsized archive company based in New Jersey, is designing a new search engine for its website, but stresses personal service to its customers.

“We aren’t solely clip-oriented—all our people here are filmmakers and work to personalize the material,” says Jessica Berman-Bogdan, the president of Global ImageWorks. “We’ve centered on trying to have unique kinds of footage. We have one of the largest private collections of Elvis Presley material, one of the largest 9/11 collections, and amazing footage from the Soviet-Afghan war, from both the Soviet and mujahideen sides.”

Berman-Bogdan is accepting of the e-commerce model, but suggests that it might not provide customers with the full scope of the company’s collection. “To avoid overutilization of certain shots and give more creative choices, we have taken a different direction. Even in this world of digital immediacy, some of the best material will not find its way online. It’s important to have a web presence, but we have to be aware of the incredible material that might never go beyond a text database. We currently have several hundred hours digitized, and hopefully, in the next few months, we will have most of it available for viewing online, and a whole new look to our website.”

BROADENING THE BUSINESS

But for all that digitization means in terms of modernizing customer relations, it serves mainly to make the traditional function of the stock-footage house quicker and easier. Many archives are also taking on new roles and courting new kinds of buyers.

“The biggest single growth market over the past year is education,” says Paul Maidment, the business-development director at BBC Motion Gallery. “The move from textbook learning to textbook-plus-online or textbook-plus-smartboard or textbook-plus-DVD or CD-ROM is really moving forward apace. We’ve been going into the archive to find clips that match the curriculum, match the syllabus or match the theme for a particular lesson that a lecturer wants to give.”

The BBC archive has launched a subscription-based website in the U.K. aimed at universities and has done deals with educational publishers in the U.S. and Germany.

The long reputation of the National Geographic Society makes it a natural for the education market in a number of areas, including video, says Shearer. “We have an established brand and credibility and scientific expertise. In education, what might have been covered with text in the past is now branching into video. It’s a difficult sell now to get a textbook adopted into a school system if you don’t have some multimedia component to it. We have some agreements with big publishers that cover video, text and photos.”

ITN Source has just launched a website called the Education Clip Library, Oberoi says. “We have 5,000 clips, growing to 25,000 by the end of the year.”

Getty Images, the large photo, music and video archive that caters more to ad agencies and media companies than educators, is broadening its appeal in other ways, including shooting fresh material for the archives. “We are looking at trends,” says Craig Peters, the VP of footage and multimedia. “What are people going to care about two or three years from now? We start filling in that map. That has huge value to an agency customer. Before the elections, we were looking at what kind of content they would need—soldiers coming home, aging population, health care. For all of those trends we started making the investment to have relevant content available for them today.”

Peters acknowledges that shooting for stock is a risky investment, given that production costs are high and sales are at a relatively low unit rate. “It is a risk, but I believe it is why Getty is different in this industry,” Peters says. “We do it with intelligence, knowing the demands of our customers and talking with our customers. We want to make it simple for customers. They can buy at one price for the needs they have without chasing down additional releases. We’re shooting for their needs, and we’re bringing the releases to the table.”

TAILOR-MADE FOOTAGE

Maidment makes it a point to get to know as many of the BBC production teams as he can. “There is a real demand for rushes and material that’s never been seen,” he says. “We ask some production departments, ‘Whilst you’re out in the Maldives, can you shoot this, that and the other?’ Some are really open to it, others less so.”

The same principle applies at National Geographic. “Because we have shooters out, at any given time, at about 12 to 15 locations around the world, we’ll have them shoot a couple extra days for the archives,” Shearer says.

BBC has also compiled about 200 hours of 3- and 5-minute segments made up of archive and newly shot material. “We’ve always licensed those into TV, cable and satellite as fillers and to the airline market,” Maidment says. “Increasingly, those short programs are working well for us online. A brand might want to associate itself with a piece of video. We’ve made a few really nice deals where we’ve done that sort of thing.”

Others are packaging their clips in ways that cater to new-media users.

Thought Equity has a new offering it calls Storyline. “We designed that mostly for the growth of online local video advertising,” Schaff says. “It provides an entire story line necessary to build a commercial.” An example might be a woman walking down the street who obviously doesn’t feel good, followed by a shot at a doctor’s office and finally a shot of her playing tennis. “In between those clips you can put product information of any type,” Schaff says.

Two new-media applications that Schaff finds promising are online advertisers and newspaper websites. The Kelsey Group, a media forecaster based in Princeton, New Jersey, predicts that local online video ad revenues will grow from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion by the end of 2012.

“It’s the local commercials,” Schaff says. “You have all these print agencies that are now doing video-based advertising to post onto things like YouTube- and MySpace-type pages. It’s the modern-day brochure. People want to make it move because it’s more effective.”

He points out, too, that traditional newspapers are becoming video-clip users and creators, in order to add motion to their websites. “They’re starting to replace their photographers with videographers shooting in a 1080p format. They can take a single frame out for the print publication and use the video for their online.”

AP, which was built on a newspaper foundation, is also moving to serve that market with video. “We have product designed specifically for newspapers,” Lindsey says. “The Online Video Network provides video every day in a built-in player. It’s a growing part of the business.”

Closed-circuit specialty networks are also buying clips. BBC’s Maidment says that the digital-screen network on the London Underground is a big client that is buying more and more.

And Shearer says National Geographic is doing production and packaging of content into short features aimed at the closed-circuit market. “There are a lot of people creating specifically programmed channels for specific markets like doctors’ offices,” she says. “All of these screens everywhere, and they don’t have a huge network budget, so there is a greater desire for preexisting content.”