ITN Source continues its expansion in China having sold 500 minutes of content to the country’s largest television broadcaster, China Central Television (CCTV). It is the fourth deal brokered for ITN by IPCN, the Anglo-Chinese media company created by Mick Desmond and Rebecca Yang.
 
To mark the launch of the Shanghai EXPO 2010, CCTV is producing 200 x 8 minute films entitled The Legend of EXPO. Through the use of ITN Source footage, the programming will trace the history of EXPO featuring film dating as far back as the 1939 World’s fair in New York to present day. The shows will be broadcast daily before the 10pm news on the biggest channel in the country CCTV-1, from 12 April right through to the end of the Shanghai Expo on 31 October.
 
Asha Oberoi, Managing Director of ITN Source said: “This is a significant content deal for ITN Source and we’re delighted to be working with China’s largest broadcaster.
 
“International growth is a key priority for ITN Source and our content spans all continents and has real relevance in the global marketplace. We’re looking forward to building our relationship with CCTV and expanding our content offering into other areas of their business.”
 
Miss Yang Xu, General Manager of IPCN added: “We are thrilled to broker the deal for ITN with CCTV; the cooperation will significantly increase the publicity of ITN Source business in the Chinese media industry, which potentially opens up tremendous opportunities.”
 
Through IPCN, ITN has a number of other deals in place in the Chinese market. For ITN Source this includes providing footage to FLTRP, the country’s biggest foreign language education publisher and Shanghai Media Group.  ITN Productions also produces a daily programme called Cool Edition for ICS, the biggest English speaking channel in China. The programme attracts 11 million viewers every night.

BBC Motion Gallery, the international stock footage arm of BBC Worldwide, has promoted Paul Maidment to lead the team following the departure of Simon Gibbs in February. Paul will become Director, BBC Motion Gallery and will manage the business and oversee its strategic direction, particularly following its new partnership with Thought Equity Motion agreed in October 2009. The new global partnership will see both companies share extensive libraries across a range of genres on a recently re-launched powerful and innovative website.

Paul joined BBC Motion Gallery in 2003 as Business Development Director and, alongside Simon Gibbs, helped to launch the company. The business now successfully represents over one million hours of footage that spans across a variety of genres including natural history, sport, news, locations, art, music and many more. Paul will also oversee BBC Motion Gallery's growing global Education business with Jan Ross leading the effort in the Americas.

Commenting on his newly appointed position, Paul Maidment said: "I am thrilled to be leading BBC Motion Gallery through its next phase of development. With its recent partnership with Thought Equity Motion, the business will present some really interesting challenges especially driving our content forward digitally and broadening the availability of our unique content to creative producers, online publishers and filmmakers worldwide."

Paul will report to Tim Mutimer, Senior Vice President for EMEA in the Sales and Distribution division of BBC Worldwide.

According to recent article in the New York Times, "C-SPAN has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet."   The C-SPAN Video Library is an impressive site, featuring not only every program aired since 1987, at a total of 160,000 hours, but also pages devoted to all members of congress. "All C-SPAN programs since 1993 are digital and can be viewed online for free," according to the C-SPAN website. "Duplicate copies of programs that have aired since 1987 can be obtained and used for education, research, review or home viewing purposes."

For anyone looking to license C-SPAN archival footage or programs for commercial usages, the site provides an online form for licensing requests.

While viewers can only stream clips at the moment, an online, searchable database of video footage of this scale is still a huge asset to documentary filmmakers and other big users of archival footage. According to the New York Times, plans are in the works to allow for downloads.

The C-SPAN Archives "records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Programs are extensively indexed making the database of C-SPAN programming an unparalleled chronological resource," according to the C-SPAN site. "Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text. The video collection can be searched through the online Video Library."

Monterrey-based Footage Search recently announced the latest expansion to its OceanFootage and NatureFootage stock footage collections with the official unveiling of all-new Red One 4K footage. The collection is growing weekly and delivery is available as master RED Raw 4K files or as HD ProRes compressed formats. The footage is being sourced from renowned cinematographers worldwide and features a growing variety of habitats and species from the deep sea to the world’s mountaintops.  A sampling of subjects currently in the OceanFootage and NatureFootage collections include a new take on ocean sunsets, crashing and crystal clear waves from topside to inside and beneath the waves, coral reefs teaming with life, sea lions, seals and other marine mammals, bait balls, city skylines, agriculture, majestic mountain ranges from around the globe, beautiful forests of all varieties from tropical to temperate, and rarely captured behavior of bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks and eagles, coyotes, and so much more.

“OceanFootage and NatureFootage will both see a rapid increase of Red One 4K footage online,” announced company founder and president Dan Baron. “We have an impressive amount of material already acquired, and anticipate enormous growth of Red One 4K content by the end of the year. The creative possibilities of what one can do with this amazing footage format are endless.”

For more information on the Red One 4K footage available at the OceanFootage and NatureFootage websites please visit: OceanFootage and NatureFootage. Footage Search Inc., founded in 2002, is a leading provider of nature and wildlife stock footage, supplying premium content to production houses worldwide through the OceanFootage and NatureFootage web sites.

Thought Equity Motion has been appointed as the exclusive licensing provider for raw news footage from The New York Times video library, which includes HD footage covering news, culture, sports, entertainment and technology, among other topics. The NYT video library houses original segments produced by New York Times' journalists around the world, and the raw footage from these segments will be made available for licensing on thoughtequity.com.

"The addition of The New York Times' video will drive new value to the collection and enable a great source of relevant content to producers using our service," said Kevin Schaff, the CEO and founder of Thought Equity Motion. "We're excited to be working with one of the world's leading media companies and an innovator in the digital space. Through our proprietary Content Services platform and Contextual Media offering, The New York Times collection will have advanced metadata tagging and delivery capabilities, making it searchable and accessible to creatives and producers looking to provide visual context to their stories."

"We're excited about applying Thought Equity Motion's leading edge technology and licensing expertise to drive new revenue from our library and furthering our goal of leveraging our interactive content in innovative ways," added Michael Greenspon, the general manager at The New York Times news service and syndicate. "With Thought Equity Motion's advanced tools, producers will be able to quickly search, preview, and download content online directly in a wide range of formats."

Thought Equity has been on something of an acquisitions spree recently, picking representation deals with the likes of BBC Motion Gallery, Marvel Entertainment and National Geographic. Through these deals, Thought Equity has greatly expanded its inventory of archival footage, news footage, HD footage, and aerial footage, adding to its already impressive collection of rights managed and royalty free video.

Best Documentary Feature Oscar award-winner, Man on Wire, included rare archive video footage provided by BBC Motion Gallery. The footage was used to support the story of Philippe Petit, the performance artist who tight-rope walked between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York.

BBC Motion Gallery images included period images of the World Trade Center against the New York City skyline, along with CBS News footage of Petit being arrested after his acrobatics and later on being interviewed by police.

"Man on Wire is a truly remarkable film and thoroughly deserving of this highest accolade. BBC Motion Gallery has been a part of many Oscar winning films over the years—and long may it continue," stated BBC Motion Gallery managing director, Simon Gibbs. "This Oscar shows how vital top quality stock footage material is in producing the finest historical documentary feature films"

Another Oscar winner, Milk, winner of both Best Actor for Sean Penn and Best Original Screenplay, also made use of BBC Motion Gallery video footage. Depicting the real-life story of Harvey Milk, the film licensed exclusive CBS News footage, featuring 47 seconds of news anchors Roger Mudd and Walter Cronkite.

After eleven years in business, WorldClips has reinvented itself as an advertiser supported site, giving away Free NTCS broadcast quality video. WorldClips.TV offers approximately 5000 clips from 50 worldwide locations.  WorldClips.TV claims that it is the first stock footage company to offer free stock footage from an ad-suppprted site.  WorldClips footage can be used for TV programs, commercials, YouTube videos, wedding videos, etc.. They’re ideal for green screen and video art, anything But resale as stock footage. For more information and/or interviews Contact: Gary Isaacson 520-398-2212.

Artbeats has announced that it will be making part of its huge library of stock footage available free. The site aims to release a different HD clip each day, with commercial values totalling over $8,000 over the course of a month.  Each clip will only be available for 24 hours, so regular visits to the Artbeats site are encouraged. uyou‘ll have to visit the site regularly to make the most of the offer. Full details below.
In this “no strings attached“ program, visitors to the Artbeats home page can access a different free clip every day simply by registering or logging-in to their online account. The clips, valued at up to $299USD each, are pre-selected directly from the Artbeats and Artbeats FootageHub libraries and are available as a free download for 24 hours. Those who take full advantage of the Daily Free Clip program can quickly enhance and build their stock footage cache with over $8,000 USD in royalty-free HD content each month.

So why is Artbeats taking such a revolutionary approach in giving away HD footage?

“It‘s simple, we are proud of our footage,“ says Artbeats President and Founder Phil Bates. “We believe that when visitors start collecting Artbeats clips and using them regularly, they will experience the quality and value of our footage first hand. This is the core foundation of the program. Our goal is to become top-of-mind for these users when they need to purchase specific clips for their projects.”

For complete details, and to begin downloading your free footage, look for the Daily Free Clip banner on the Artbeats home page.

Click here to visit Artbeats online

An experiment in crowd-sourced digitization kicked off last week with the inaugural meeting of the International Amateur Scanning League. Carl Malamud, president of Public.Resource.Org, the nonprofit dedicated to the free and open access of public domain material, announced that "David Ferriero, the U.S. Archivist, joined me in the initial meeting where we taught volunteers how to rip DVDs!"

This new club's first task will be to organize its volunteers to digitize 1,500 DVDs from the National Archives and Records Administration so that the content can be shared on YouTube, the Internet Archive and PublicResource.org's Public Domain Stock Footage Theater for free. This grassroots effort brings more citizen hands on board FedFlix -- a joint venture by National Technical Information Service to digitize and put government videotapes online.

"The International Amateur Scanning League is an experiment in crowd-sourced digitization to help government and other institutions make their archives more widely available," said Malmud.  "Volunteers will be given credit for their work in the online metadata, will receive cool tchotchkes, and will be eligible to display Public Domain Merit Badges upon completion of designated levels of service."

On a more serious note, he added, "when citizens help make works of the government more broadly available, this leads not only to increased access by the public but a host of commercial opportunities for print-on-demand, DVD sales, and other value-added operations."

So far, 25 volunteers -- including employees of the Smithsonian working after hours and members of DC CopyNight, a social gathering of people who meet to talk about developments in copyright law -- have been mobilized. Some of this stuff is not easy to do. "Digitizing videotape, for example, takes some real training and equipment," Malamud admitted. Nonetheless, he hopes that the new club will pave the way for a host of new crowd-sourcing initiatives that will help make the public domain more accessible.

Oddball Film+Video,  the leading provider of offbeat and unusual stock footage, has recently acquired disturbing terrorist footage along with over a hundred eclectic, archival film prints from the 1940s and 1950s. Oddball’s quirky collection features over 50,000+ 35mm, 16mm and HD historical and contemporary clips in all genres.

One of the most shocking recent collections represented by Oddball Film+Video contains footage of terrorist and insurgent operations in hotspots around the world, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia. Among the 52 clips in the collection are scenes of bombings, insurgent combat, sniper attacks and terrorist training camps. The collection also features the Al Qaeda leaders of today (Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri) and tomorrow (Abu Mansour the American and Abu Yahya Al Libbi, who escaped from U.S. custody in Afghanistan). Oddball also acquired a diverse collection of quirky films from the 1940s and 1950s featuring sultry burlesque dancers and cheeky nudies, vintage automobile manufacturing films, silent comedies and cartoons, and old musical shorts called “Soundies” originally made to be projected on stand alone film “jukeboxes”.

For more information, please contact Ellie Duddridge, Public Relations Director at Oddball Film+Video at 415-558-8112 or email her at pr@oddballfilm.com.