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MillimeterAdventures in Repurposing
Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
A young licensing agency builds a modern stock footage platform.
With online interfaces already transforming the way stock footage is marketed, sold, tracked, and purchased, Kevin Schaff, Thought Equity founder and CEO, set out to offer a more streamlined model with some unique features.
Last month, National Geographic Digital Motion (NGDM), the stock footage service of the geographic society's Digital Media division, announced that it had chosen Denver-based Thought Equity as its Internet-based licensing and distribution partner.
The deal with National Geographic continued a string of successes for the four-year-old company, which reported revenue growth of some 500 percent for the first six months of 2006. More than 100,000 hours of high-quality film and video footage from internationally respected content creator NGDM joined Thought Equity's roster of 165,000 clips, which includes the production libraries of Sony Pictures Entertainment and HBO, NCAA footage, and a unique collection of customizeable commercials.
The small, 35-person company began by selling “on-spec” print work — material that ad agencies had sitting around in storage that might be useful to newspapers, magazines, or anyone who wanted to save money yet create good-looking ad campaigns.
“Originally, I had thought the print side of things would be my main market,” says Kevin Schaff, Thought Equity founder and CEO. “But since many of the campaigns also had an advertisement attached to them, we found that we got much more interest — and money — for that motion imagery than for the print work.”
Schaff says he thought the online market for motion imagery seemed fragmented and confusing to use; he wanted to bring a clean, standardized method to what was becoming an increasingly lucrative marketplace. BBC Worldwide has estimated the current stock footage market at $300 million per year, and expected it to grow to $1 billion by 2010. Proliferating Internet ads, games, and other snippets for cell phones, and even for the coming digital billboards, would all need high-quality footage that could be bought for a fixed fee. With this new distribution landscape in mind, Thought Equity set out to deliver a high volume of content in multiple formats from Adobe Flash to 2K. With online interfaces already transforming the way stock footage is marketed, sold, tracked, and purchased, Schaff thought he could offer a more streamlined model with unique features.
In the highly competitive stock marketplace, the business plan contained a concept Schaff expected would be irresistible to the creative community. The killer app? Pre-packaged productions, a sort of “chef's prep” product that delivered mix-and-match components from high-gloss, full-motion commercials that either hadn't made it beyond the spec stage or contained non-proprietary but quality footage that couldn't be reproduced on the cheap.
