Footage
Footage Net has asked a several footage licensing experts how they deal with the increasing demand for 4K footage. With roughly four times the pixels of standard HD footage (8.3 million versus 2 million), 4K footage offers remarkable sharpness, a great sense of depth and a much subtler color range. It is quickly becoming commonplace in the footage business. The experts asked to weigh in on the ins and outs of working with this new format include: Carol Martin of
FootageBank, Sterling Zunbrunn of
Nature Footage and Peter Carstens of
Framepool.
Can usage fees continue to drop? Most videographers think that
Shutterstock’s prices for video clips at $19 for web use, $49 for an SD file, $79 for HD and $299 for 4K are about as low as prices could go. Any lower and videographers would no longer go to the trouble of creating new clips.
Last week we published a story about
AudioBlocks a new platform licensing royalty-free music by subscription. Today, I want to examine the parent company,
VideoBlocks, that was launched in 2010 and licenses royalty-free video clips by subscription.
Pond5, the world’s leading online marketplace for video footage and stock media, announced today that it has raised $61 million in equity financing from Accel Partners and Stripes Group. The funding is the first institutional investment for the company and will be used to fuel global growth, hiring, and product development.
Footage.net recently asked David Peck, President of
Reelin' in the Years Productions (RITY), the world's largest library of music footage and the exclusive representative of all footage from the Merv Griffin Show, to walk us through the basic steps involved in licensing entertainment and performance related footage.
The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (
ACSIL), a trade association serving the interests of the world’s leading archival footage and stock licensors, has announced its newly elected Co-Presidents: Max Segal and Clara Fon-Sing.
Getty Images has announced the call for entries for its
Getty Images’ grants programs for 2014. The grants will include – The
Grants for Editorial Photography,
Creative Grants and the
Contour by Getty Images Portrait Prize – as well as the
Emerging Talent Award. The deadline for entry and Applications is May 15, 2014 by 11:59 p.m. GMT (London Time). For more information see
http://www.gettyimages.com/grants.
Shutterstock has reported a record 28 million downloads and $68 million in revenue for Q4 2013. The company’s revenue for all of 2013 was $235.5 million, up from $169.6 in 2012. About 28% of the revenue was paid out to contributors in royalties.
I get a lot of questions about the size of the video clip market and its potential for growth. There is very little hard data publicly available. Back in 2011 The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) conducted a
global survey to determine the size of the stock footage market. They concluded that the total stock video revenue generated in 2010 was about $394 million. ACSIL believes the revenue generated in 2013 will be about the same.
There is a growing demand for narrowly focused image collections that provide high quality, tightly edited and in depth coverage of their particular niche.
DisabilityImages is a good example of one such collection.
Visual Connections has announced that
Visual Connections Chicago (), the leading forum to meet and learn from image/footage buyers, will be moving to a new venue in 2014. Bookings for the Thursday, April 24, 2014 event will open on Wednesday, December 18 at 10am ET.
Footage.net’s Zap Email Service enables creative professionals to instantly send their footage requests to over 50 top footage houses via a single email. Footage companies participating on the service receive a daily stream of new footage requests.
Pond5’s stock footage collection now exceeds 2 million clips. In addition the Redcode RAW (R3D) -- the native format for the popular RED series of ultra-HD cameras -- is now supported on the platform (
http://www.pond5.com/r3d).
Educational publishers are telling stock agencies and image creators that they need more and “better quality” still images. Despite declining prices many still photographers are continuing to try to improve on the images of educational subjects already in stock agencies. This may be a losing strategy for photographers.
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has agreed a global five-year partnership with
Getty Images, in which Getty Images will represent BBC Motion Gallery, BBC Worldwide’s prestigious video clip sales business. The agreement will see the world-renowned BBC Motion Gallery brand continue, with Getty Images as the exclusive global distributor.
Patrick Lor, co-founder of iStockphoto and formerly leader of Fotolia North America, has founded a stock footage company called
Dissolve. Lor’s company makes a significant number of clips available for $5 although some clips are priced at $50, $150 and $500.
The New York Times has published a story about “
Let the Fire Burn” a new film due out today that chronicles the 1985 bombing by the Philadelphia Police of a house occupied by the radical group known as Move. The fire spread to 60 other houses in the neighborhood.
At the recent Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2013 Digital Content NewFronts conference in New York 75% of the senior executives attending said they plan to shift more of their advertising budget from television to digital video ads over the next year.
Footage.net has compiled a collection of stock footage clips that number more than 3 million and includes collections from Getty Images, FootageBank, Framepool, CNN ImageSource and Shutterstock.
Video is starting to become the new essential for stills libraries. Although the two majors have had motion divisions for years, most UK photo-libraries avoided video for a number of reasons: technical complexity, bandwidth and the uncertainties of a new market, compounded by the economic difficulties of the past few years.
National Geographic has gathered its expansive archive of still and moving images and its roster of award-winning photographic and filmmaking talent and made them accessible to the creative community in one place, through
National Geographic Creative.
Anyone interested in a career as a photographer – as well as those photographers in mid-career -- needs to carefully consider how the business is changing. If we look at image use on the Internet it is undeniable that more images are being made available for viewing. However, for professionals this is not good news.
More image use does not mean more demand for professionally produced images. It does not mean that there will be more opportunities for photographers to earn their living taking pictures. In fact, the opportunities to earn a living as a photographer are declining. Here’s why.
If you are a young person who wants a career in visual communications where are the opportunities likely to be? They are least likely to be in print publishing. This article presents statistics that explain why and gives some insights into the potential for video.
Pond5 Inc. has acquired the assets of Pixmac, a leading stock imagery network based in the Czech Republic. With millions of stock photos and illustrations distributed in 17 languages and in multiple currencies, the acquisition of Pixmac accelerates Pond5’s strategy to offer a global marketplace where media makers can connect with fellow artists.
Over two million preview clips from over forty top footage collections are now available through Footage.net (
www.footage.net). By partnering with many of the world’s most prestigious footage companies, including Getty Images, FootageBank, Framepool, CNN ImageSource and Shutterstock, Footage.net has grown rapidly to become one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive online stock footage databases, and a powerful production resource.