Taking Stock

October 2007

In a rapidly changing media landscape where everyone from TV producers and filmmakers to advertisers and corporations are looking to get their product and messages out on as many platforms as possible, the archive-footage industry is scrambling to keep up with the demand. Traditional broadcast outlets continue to comprise the bulk of the requests for footage, but that tide is turning as more new-media players arrive on the scene.

From powerhouses like Getty Images and ITN Source to smaller boutique companies like WGBH Stock Sales and Global ImageWorks, the stock-footage industry has been ramping up efforts to digitize its libraries and make a broad selection of its content available online. “A company cannot be competitive without digitizing its content,” says Craig Peters, the VP of footage and multimedia at Getty Images.

While there are still a number of companies that would rather put in a request over the phone for the specific images they’re looking for, there are other clients who are not willing to wait for a screening tape. According to Peters, compressed production time lines are driving the increased demand for digitized footage. “Customers want to easily search, preview, and download footage on a real-time basis.”

Getty Images recently launched a new website that offers more user-friendly features, such as improved search and preview functions and the ability to purchase and download broadcast-quality footage. The new site also includes a simplified licensing model that offers customers cost-effective pricing for several categories of images.

Another factor in the push for digitized footage is the ease of purchasing online. “Customers can more easily shop varying sources,”says Peters. “If they can search, preview and download from other services, you can no longer hide your content behind a veil of researchers, tape delivery, etc.”

According to Asha Oberoi, the content director at ITN Source, Reuters and ITN are two of the company’s top-selling libraries, a fact she attributes to their availability on the company’s website. “In a nutshell,” says Oberoi, “the more we digitize, the more we sell. [Conversely], the libraries that aren’t digitized [and] aren’t immediately available on our website have worse commercial figures than those that do. We have an e-commerce platform, and that’s increasingly generating revenue for us, and we’re investing in that website to increase our commercial growth. But I don’t think we would be half as successful as we are without a website that allowed people to search, view and buy.”

At the same time, Colette Forest, the manager of archive sales at Radio-Canada, the French-language national broadcaster of Canada, has not seen a surge in requests for digitized footage among her clients. “They still prefer the old-fashioned tape and the personal approach,” says Forest. “We know our collection better than anyone. And even if we were to digitize part of it, it would be a very small portion, because there’s no way we can put thousands and thousands of hours of footage on our website. It would be too difficult.”

Digital presence

WGBH Stock Sales, which licenses footage from the public-television station WGBH Boston, is actively working on building a digital library and currently offers 64 full-length episodes of the public-affairs series Frontline for streaming online. While Alison Smith, the associate director of research and stock sales at WGBH Media Library, believes that the traditional client approach is important, she is adamant about having a digital presence. “It’s absolutely crucial to digitize as much as you can of your library. If you don’t have some kind of an online presence, you’re really at a disadvantage, and I don’t know whether you’d be able to survive ultimately.”

There is also a growing demand for prepackaged programming, as more people are pressed to exploit all the new emerging platforms on limited budgets. Stock footage used to refer to individual clips that people would use to create new product, but this is not always the case anymore, explains Jocelyn Shearer, the VP of video licensing and archive management at National Geographic Digital Motion. “People are trying to do so much on a small budget on so many platforms. There’s a huge appetite for a degree of preproduction.” She says that clients are looking for clips that are already strung together, or short-form videos that have been edited.

“One of the things we got smarter in doing is preempting stories or anniversaries and [providing] packages of content to promote to buyers,” says Paul Maidment, the business-development director at BBC Motion Gallery, the footage licensing arm of the British public broadcaster.

While Maidment notes that many clients have been requesting clips of David Beckham and from the BBC’s children’s call-in quiz show Blue Peter, news, sports, and travel footage are still popular.

Footage related to war, the conflict in the Middle East, and Al Qaeda also continue to sell well. WGBH Stock Sales has licensed Al Qaeda material to CBS, CBC and most recently to PBS, for the program America at a Crossroads.

Shearer says that she continues to get requests for international locations and wildlife—the company’s specialties—but she is also receiving more requests for “snippets of life in other countries” that touch on the “global village” theme, such as a family in Africa going about their daily lives.

CONVENIENT FOOTAGE

The interest in global warming and climate change, spurred on by documentaries like the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, has also prompted a similar increase in the demand for footage on these topics. According to ITN Source’s Oberoi, the topic of climate change has definitely had an impact on the company’s revenues. “We have a collection called Survival, which is a wildlife series. The top-selling items of the wildlife series in the past two years have been directly linked to climate-change stories.”

Current TV has selected ITN Source as the exclusive supplier of video content for its competition “60 Seconds to Save the Earth,” which challenges viewers in the U.S. and the U.K. to create 15-, 30- or 60-second public-service announcements about taking action or motivating change to help fight the climate crisis. ITN Source has extracted over 20 short video clips of scenes related to the climate crisis and the environment from its video archive, which entrants can download and incorporate into their spots for free.

There has also been an upswing in the demand for high-definition content. According to Shearer, the charge for high-definition content is led mostly by North America, which is neck and neck with Japan. “We’re not acquiring any new content that is not either made in HD, or been shot on 35mm film that we can transfer to HD,” says Shearer. “We recognize that as much as there is a lot of wonderful footage around on standard definition, if [the footage] ultimately cannot be effectively transferred to HD, it’s going to have a pretty short shelf life.”

SHARPER IMAGES

BBC Motion Gallery continues to bolster its collection of high-definition footage. It brokered a distribution deal with the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV in April to represent its library of predominantly HD footage. BBC Motion Gallery also represents the archives of the Japanese public broadcaster NHK outside of Japan, and a majority of its content is produced in high-definition.

Radio-Canada’s Forest has also noticed an increase in the number of requests for high-definition programming this year. Since Radio-Canada’s archives include 125,000 hours of film, Forest says that they can meet the demand because they are able to convert the film to HD, which is easier than converting video into HD.

In order to remain competitive, stock-footage companies have also been extending the reach of their footage beyond traditional broadcast and television production to tap into other revenue streams. ITN Source has experienced a 6-percent increase in revenues over the last two years in the nonbroadcast sectors. In 2005, 82 percent of the company’s revenues came from broadcast and traditional television production and only 18 percent from non-broadcast areas. In 2006, that ratio was 79 percent from broadcast and 21 percent nonbroadcast. Broadcast sales continued to dip again in 2007, accounting for 76 percent of total revenue, while nonbroadcast took up 24 percent.

ITN Source has continued to expand into new media and in May closed a deal with the content distributor Mochila. The agreement allows Mochila to syndicate ITN Source video content to news services like the Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters for use on their websites. ITN Source is currently supplying Mochila with short-form content packages such as “Animal Mimics,” “Wacky Inventions” and “Amazing Feats,” as well as a selection of rights-cleared footage from Granada, Fox News, British Pathe and Reuters.

According to BBC Motion Gallery’s Maidment, the broadcast market remains strong thanks to the continued proliferation of channels. Broadcast sales “still remain our bread and butter; television is not going to go away.”

THE CHANGING PIE

However, Maidment says, the company’s biggest growth markets are in four nonbroadcast areas: education, corporate, advertising and IPTV. “I would say that about 70 percent of our business is in broadcast, but I would expect that to drop to around 55 percent within five years,” he notes.

Jessica Berman-Bogdan, the president of Global ImageWorks, says that the bulk of her company’s footage continues to be licensed to nonfiction filmmakers, but she too has seen an increase in sales to producers of commercials, feature films and new-media content. “A majority of our clients are now requesting ‘all media’ licensing as the potential of new-media distribution outlets are being recognized and required by many broadcasters and distributors,” she says. In addition to recently licensing footage to documentaries like Michael Moore’s Sicko, and the movie Black Snake Moan, the company has also supplied archive images to the newly launched online video portal MyDamnChannel.com.

However, due to the complicated licensing issues that have cropped up from the growing number of digital-media platforms, there have been efforts under way in the stock-footage industry to simplify the licensing process for both the licensor and the licensee. The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) is a stock-footage trade organization that is attempting to address the current complex licensing model, and standardize the terminology that is being used throughout the industry.

“We need to revamp the system because many companies are licensing by technology, and pricing any new technology that comes along, whereas traditionally, licensing was a matter of audience and market,” explains WGBH’s Smith, who is a charter member of ACSIL. “One of ACSIL’s initiatives is to try to introduce a new license system that will not really be based on technology. [Instead], it will go back to markets and audiences and try to simplify what has become a very unwieldy system.”

According to Berman-Bogdan, who is also a charter member of ACSIL, the licensing system has become more complicated because not everyone in the industry is defining rights in the same way. “For example, what one person defines as VOD is often quite different from another [person’s definition]. Additionally, licensees and/or broadcasters are increasingly requiring rights to cover ‘all rights, all media hereinafter and further devised’ as protection for all future eventualities and media that might not yet even exist. But asking for such a broad grant of rights is often unaffordable and unnecessary.”

ACSIL has compiled a glossary of terms and definitions that would help simplify the current licensing model, particularly the complications associated with new-media licensing. According to Berman-Bogdan, this is a new “licensing grid” that can be used across all areas of media licensing. ACSIL has been presenting it at various industry conferences and production-community events for debate and feedback.