Stock footage: A brave new world

Jessica Berman-Bogdan: president, Global ImageWorks (Haworth, NJ)
Kristl Date-Dopps: director of product marketing, film, Getty Images (Seattle)
Paula Lumbard: founder/CEO, FootageBank HD (Venice, CA)
Jan Ross: senior vice president, BBC Motion Gallery (LA)
Kevin Schaff: CEO, Thought Equity (Denver)
Jocelyn Shearer: director of worldwide sales, National Geographic Digital Motion (Washington, DC)
Gary Shenk: senior vice president, images, Corbis (New York)

The micropayment models popularized by iStockPhoto and others, and the 'crowdsourcing' phenomenon, where material is contributed from viewers, are beginning to emerge in the stock footage realm - what impact do you think they'll have?
Shearer: We've created 'vending machine' models and online models to somewhat commoditize and lower overall costs and raise margins. It's going to happen even more quickly than perhaps we'd imagined, because of these new multi-platforms and rich media. And that segues nicely into the subscription and micropayment model question, where you're going in the direction of: 'Okay, multimedia has changed the way people consume moving content - what does that mean in terms of the economics of it?'
Ross: What does that mean in terms of the unfiltered access to it as well. As professionals, we are looking at making sure what we're offering is cleared and has no rights issues, but there's a new culture, if you will, arising. I think there's room for both the mainstream and independent markets, but the issue is: can these parallel cultures exist with this unfiltered access that's going to create a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace in terms of use and rights?
Schaff: I think they can both exist - it's a matter of timing. Look at accessibility. Today you can get millions of photos online, but you can't get that with footage, even with the top libraries... The largest online library is only a few hundred thousand clips.
So, if you're looking at the volume of people and the cost associated with driving things like subscription sites, the accessibility in professional footage isn't there yet, and that market will have to mature before you see subscription sites take off more effectively.
Date-Dopps: Getty Images recognizes the importance of social media and we see it as the ability to serve all markets at all price points that will drive market growth for the whole imagery industry. The subscription/micropayment model creates a gateway to get a whole different market interested in using imagery in a licensed way that they might not have thought about before. There's a market that could be tapped through this affordable new model, and that will help us at the top end as well.
Shenk: On the photo side, there are two big impacts of the micropayment model - number one is there's pricing pressure at the high end. It's a business model that in and of itself is sustainable but it's definitely going to impact the 'traditional' stock business. Even if it doesn't displace the customer, it creates the perception of a lower price point.
Secondly, I do think it's a viable market for a different type of customer. The quality tends to be lower. That's not always the case, but as you apply it to footage the quality dimension can play out in different ways: the way the content was shot, the quality of how it's digitized. There's definitely going to be the market for that type of customer at a lower price point, and I would see that market as a growth opportunity.
Lumbard: For us, the subscription model has been put into place in relation to people licensing materials on an ongoing basis for television programs or that sort of thing. So, our subscription clients are not necessarily someone working at home on their iMac... For footage to be deliverable in a micropayment venue, [such as] the fully uncompressed high-definition materials we work with, the technology that's going to underlie the delivery of that is still in play.
Ross: The important thing we're asking here is: 'What do people want?' I think it's a little short-sighted to try to say any more what that is. We're at an intersection between the commercial and the non-commercial worlds... There are an infinite number of niche markets now. And that's the exciting part of it. Like everyone says, that's going to grow the [overall] market.
Berman-Bogdan: The thing I think validates a lot of what we do as commercial archives is there's such an overabundance of images as a result of all these new people putting all this content out there. It helps to have a place to sort it out, to think it through or to trust, and not get lost in the choices.

How has your company adapted to doing business via the Net?
Schaff: The real driving factors are real-time search, preview and delivery. I'm interested to hear everybody else's take on this: our tape delivery is down 85% from last year, yet our overall number of files being delivered has increased over 500%. That's an interesting shift. I'd never have guessed that it would be that radically driven by technology.
Shearer: I can second that. We still have such a huge pile of material on analog that we're working our way through, as once it's digitized we can transcode on the fly into any format. But we're finding we're having to digitize analog just to send out as previews because the demand is so high.