Free-to-air now, pay later

With over 700,000 hours of footage, ITN Source will soon be releasing some of it to the public for free download. After recently becoming a partner of The Creative Archive Licence Group - whose goal is to give the public access to content from public and commercial uk collections - ITN Source (formerly ITN Archive) will share archive content for home and personal use. (For example, for school projects and video emails.)

Why would a commercial organization like ITN join such a cause? As ITN chief executive Mark Wood says, with people experimenting with video content on free-to-air websites like YouTube and Google's Video Store (which ITN Source signed a partnership deal with earlier this year to supply content), the deal is a good marketing tool. In addition to helping school kids, it's also a showcase for some of ITN Source's strongest material, which Wood hopes will trigger commercial leads. For that reason, he says ITN Source's involvement "has both an altruistic and a commercial dimension.

"This is one way to familiarize people with using video in the way they've long been comfortable with using stills. We'll be helping to educate new generations of people to become creative using video content, and these are the customers of the future for us." And that's the bottom line.