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Whether you're an entrepreneur or an established production company, selling video footage online involves the same principles:
- Pick the business model you are comfortable with
- Acquire great stock
- Use honed and proven footage library software solutions and
- Give the buyer more than they expect.
Later, you can expand your business model or launch new brands to cater for different market sectors. But the business is tough enough - so start with what you know and what you are comfortable with.
Standard library business models.
The standard business models, whether its image, motion, music etc are as follows.
- Niche / Specialist
- Generalist
- Microsite
Within each of these business models you have a choice of how you acquire and market the product. Putting acquistion aside for the moment you can sell product
- Royalty free
- Rights Managed
- Simple licence
- Discounted
Rights managed and royalty free footage and video.
Rights management for footage libraries is still evolving and, so far, it is less complex than rights management for Image libraries.
However, rights management calculations can be different for each footage library - it's one way of keeping your competitive edge.
Our system has royalty free and discount calculations e.g. 2 for 3 , 3 for 5 etc for both footage clips and CD or DVD compilations.
You can also set discounts at client account level.
Market Positioning
Once you have decided on the business model and licensing type you then need to work out your market position. For example, in the race to establish market dominance several business models are being tried. Most follow the image library business models; so to sell video online in volume, companies are following the "microsite" model pioneered three years ago by istockphoto.com - who later morphed their model to istockvideo.com.
Istockphoto.com was purchased by industry leader Gettyimages.com after Istock came out of nowhere in 2006 taking all of Getty's and Corbis traffic and changing the world as they knew it.
The lesson to be learned, if you want to sell low cost video online via the microsite business model, are that you'll need:
- Many thousands of
- Good quality video clips
- Ready for sale
- At low cost
So how do you achieve this? Most businesses will use one or more of the following
- Co-distribution deals with other video libraries or content owners
- Buy content from video libraries or content owners
- Split commission with User Generated Content (U.G.C.) providors.
Once you have decided that microsite is the route for you, you'll need microsite footage library software; you may need an API module plug-in for shared or co-distribution and you may want a UGC module too. Depending on your planned business size there are 2 flavours of UGC - UGC lite if you have a single editor or an enterprise version for several editors to review new content simultaneously.
Either way our footage library software price is the same low cost whether you are an entreprenuer or a multinational corporation.
An entry level footage library starts at ?4,500 and up depending on the models and modules you mix.
For some considered advice on what you need to successfully sell video online call 0208 123 1778 and ask for Derek Mansfield. Alternatively write to us here and we'll contact you quickly
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