The Future is Stock Footage, Rather than Images

psargent | September 29, 2005, 05:29 PM

I came across an interesting article in the October 2005 issue of Wired magazine. A company called Ribbit Films (www.ribbitfilms.com) is “ushering the stock-footage industry into the digital age.” They sell royalty free footage of everything from a soccer player making a bicycle kick to two business people shaking hands.

More specifically, the footage is chromakey shot in hi-def. Chromakey is essentially green screen a la Star Wars (more circa 1980 than 2002). This means that Ribbit’s footage (be it the soccer player or the Millennium Falcon) can be superimposed onto any background footage (e.g. a stadium full of people, outer space) for use in…say…TV commercials (Microsoft has already produced a commercial using Ribbit’s footage) as well as special effects in the movies.

Seems like pretty basic stuff, but it appears that the applications for such footage don’t end there. Beyond a cheaper way to produce TV commercials, you have to think…smaller.

Every single “bumper” you see on TV between the preceding commercials and the introduction of a TV show or sporting event could use this stuff.

Here’s an example:

You just came back from another Budweiser commercial with scantily clad bikini models lying in the snow (I know. Their commercials are as bad as their beer.) And for just a few seconds before Al Michaels and John Madden come back on the screen to call the football game, there’s usually some graphics (including maybe the current score of the game) on your TV screen. So, this type of footage could spruce it up a little bit. Show a silhouette of a place kicker kicking off, or a wide receiver doing a celebratory dance in the endzone. The footage adds a little more flare to that 3-second bumper. If you think about it, everything from news programs to sporting events to TV-shows could use such footage for transitioning to/from their programs. So it’s really “video clip art” as much as it is footage.

And as it turns out, nobody other than Ribbit Films really does this stuff for commercial sale. The largest CPG companies like Nike and Coke certainly produce their own stock video footage. But they regard these assets as intellectual property. (Hey, they spent the bucks to produce it, so why should they sell it off to a competitor?)

And that’s another thing. This stuff is rather expensive. Shooting and editing such content and making it available for these types of applications can easily run a company into the six-figure range. A company like Nike is certainly going to want to protect this stuff, while a smaller business simply can’t afford to produce the footage at all. Ribbit Films is selling these clips at $299 a pop.

Hmmm…maybe I need to speak to someone over at JupiterImages about this.