Growing use of the Internet for marketing and distribution has allowed smaller stock footage players to play on a more level field with the big houses, just as demand for all-purpose clips is hitting an all-time high thanks to the rise of HD, portable video and other technological shifts.

‘Stock footage is one of the few products that you can look at, sample and deliver over the Internet,’ says Richard Boddington, founder and CEO of Time Image, an Ontario-based royalty-free stock provider that does much of its business over the web.

Time Image is launching a dedicated website, hdshots.com, featuring HD location footage from American cities and the U.K., and some nature photography.

‘You can provide stock footage with music and software, while cutting out the duplication and FedEx delivery charges,’ says Boddington.

And as broadcasters start to upload product to the Internet, online rights to stock footage will become increasingly important, adds Les Harris, president and CEO of Toronto-based Canamedia. The same holds true, he says, with stock footage to be viewed on cellphones, another growth market.

Bus Stop TV

Europe is ahead of North America in cellphone use, but Harris is among those who foresee more ‘Bus Stop TV’ – programming no longer than a few minutes long – finding its way into the domestic market.

‘Comedy writers are using archive footage. They take shots of Hitler, change the narration and it becomes funny,’ he says.

Boddington concedes that demand for HD stock footage, however, has begun slowly.

‘Many people are reluctant to toss out their standard-definition gear and buy new cameras, decks, monitors, and editing software when they have already made a significant investment in their existing gear,’ he says. And yet broadcasters have the transition in view.

‘We’re going that way,’ says Carol Ashurst, CTV director of research, archives and archive sales, of the current migration of CTV’s stock footage facility.

As yet, CTV has no HD content in its stock footage library, though it expects to generate a slew of it from its coverage of the 2010 Olympics.

The National Film Board is also slowly adding HD footage to its collection, including 300 hours from the Arctic Mission series shoot and footage from Paul Cowan’s The Peacekeepers.

Elsewhere, veteran stock footage players continue to acquire the Canadian rights to foreign collections: the NFB recently added the National Geographic and Gaumont Pathé libraries, and CTV inked a reciprocal representation deal with the London-based library of Associated Press Television News.

Throughout the industry, vendors report they can fill more requests for stock footage because their collections have grown.

The NFB says it is receiving the most demand for stock shots involving themes of animals, war, the 1960s and ’70s, and footage of the Inuit and Arctic regions.

And Canamedia, which offers Canadian producers and broadcasters access to the ITN and National History New Zealand archives, points to increased interest in Second World War footage, especially for documentaries made for History Television and Discovery Channel Canada.

The proliferation of specialty channels and digis overall has expanded the market for aerials, nature shots, lifestyle and time-lapse imagery. There’s also increased demand for stock footage among the swelling ranks of the desktop video revolution, be it for corporate videos or even places of worship, which are incorporating more audio-visual content into services.

New digital capture technologies have also brought down the cost of motion-control time-lapse stock footage.

Vancouver-based filmmaker Rene Beland of TimeLapse Digital has become a one-man operation, capturing time-lapse footage using a digital still camera. (See story, page 23.)

‘I can be set up and shooting in 30 minutes, so it’s fast and efficient – one more way I can keep the cost down for the customer,’ he says.

-www.timeimage.com

-www.canamedia.com

-www.ctv.ca

-www.nfb.ca

-www.timelapsedigital.com