Future Image Demand In Education

At the PACA International Conference in October, Christie Silver of McGraw Hill School Education Group provided details on where her team found images for a major reading program they have been working on this year.

She also provided insights as to how educational publishers will be sourcing images in the future and pointed out that the main focus of all educational efforts these days is digital. More than 50% of the projects her team worked on during the past year were for digital delivery of the product.

Silver added, “Only certain products are print. There will be less and less printing. But, we are still dealing with a marketplace where the majority of users and classrooms are not equipped with the technology that would enable them to have a completely digital experience. So until that takes place we will continue to print products.”



RF Taking Over

There were 23,806 images used in the various products that are part of the reading program that will be available in 2013.  42% of those images (and this included illustrations) were acquired from traditional RM sources. An additional 8% were new RF images acquired this year.



But, an astounding 48% of the images used came from McGraw Hill’s wholly owned digital asset library made up to a great extent of RF images that McGraw Hill had acquired in previous years for previous products. As the industry moves ahead, each year the company will purchases a few more RF images, but they will be used over and over again. The percentage of RM images acquired for future projects will certainly decline.

The other 2% of still imagery and illustration not accounted for in the figures above were produced on assignment because satisfactory stoek images were not available.

Microstock



Despite the heavy use of RF imagery, McGraw Hill tends not to acquire much from microstock sources. Microstock is often more expensive than RM or traditional RF. With microstock the standard fee usually limits the number of impressions in printed products to less than 500,000. Typically, educational publishers want the freedom to print more than that number during the life of a product. To get unlimited print rights they must purchase an extended or enhanced license and this can add $100 to $200 to the standard microstock price. This makes discounted RM much more attractive than microstock.

In current microstock agreements the number of online impressions seem to be limitless. Thus, as educational publishers move more and more to delivering their products online -- and print few copies -- there may be less need for them to worry about print runs.

Video

On the same reading program project McGraw Hill also used 1,378 videos. 50% of the clips used were RM stock and 21% were RF. Two percent came from the company’s digital asset library. They expect to use more and more video on future projects.

Twenty-seven percent of the clips used were created on assignment because satisfactory footage was not available as stock. Silver said, “We weren’t finding the reactions of the actors to be believable. We know it is more challenging on the video side because you have to get directors and good actors involved. It’s different than being a still model.” Many situations did not have the ring of authenticity. Safety is also an issue for educational publishers. Proper use of helmets, car seats and safety equipment in school labs are important considerations. Educational publishers also need good live audio to go with the video and this is usually not included in stock video offerings.

Given the lack of good moving footage often video segments are created using stills. In addition many of the available clips are too short. Currently, when editing video for stock there is a tendency to take one long action and break it up into many small pieces. Often these pieces are not even together in the search return order. Silver said they tend to need longer segments and would like to see the entire continuous action and make their own decisions about cuts.
 
While there will be growing future demand for video that can be used in educational products, given the unique requirements of the education market it is questionable – from the creators point of view – whether the demand and the pricing will be enough to justify creating stock video for education. Maybe the better solution is to go after that 27% of assignments.