The new film Glory Road re-enacts a moment in basketball history that changed the face of the game forever - the 1966 NCAA championship game where the Texas Western Miners emerged victorious over the Kentucky Wildcats. It was the first championship game in which a team put five black starters on the court and one that helped break down racial barriers.

Denver-based stock footage house Thought Equity recently scored a slam dunk of its own when in late January it procured the licensing rights for the NCAA Sports Collection, consisting of the entire library of NCAA championship coverage from 1906 to today. And as some of that footage shows up in the credits of Glory Road, we can forgive Thought Equity CEO/founder Kevin Schaff for invoking the film when he calls his company "the Cinderella story of this industry, with all of its growth in technology."

Indeed, Schaff's analogy brings to light the changing face of the stock footage industry - the evolution of online search, preview and distribution capability has brought smaller niche companies much higher visibility, while giving larger mainstays the means to effectively display the breadth of their inventories. But in the current environment where expectations for the material and the workflow process are higher with each new tech development, the race is on among all companies to make some moves, take some risks and effectively market themselves as the most comprehensive and convenient imagery source.

"This year, we'll be the largest online footage inventory in the world by almost double," asserts Schaff. "We're able to be that because of our technology. We've spent millions focused on only one asset type. If you can focus just on one asset type you can give the users what they need."

shoot for diversity

While the smaller companies tout the value of focus, there's also recognition that to compete effectively with the larger houses, diversification is integral to growing the business. Bettina Dalton, managing director for Australia's Absolutely Wild Visuals, says that the company, which boasts up to 30,000 shots accessible online and is known for its wildlife collections, is branching into new areas such as landscape, indigenous peoples, adventure and environmental shots. It is also now repping collections from the Australian Tourist Commission and serves as the Australian rep for the UK's Movietone Studios. And with a background in production (AWV was formerly a documentary prodco), Dalton also endeavors to bring assorted value adds to the client.

"Last year we did a shoot-to-order commercial for Danone Yogurt, with Matador out of Indonesia," she says. "They couldn't find the exact tiger shots they wanted, so we organized to shoot a captive tiger on 35mm, leaping and performing against a greenscreen. We shot it and retained the rights to the all raw footage, and it's very versatile for TV creators and producers to work with."

Dan Baron, founder and president of California's OceanFootage.com and the newly launched NatureFootage.com, also maintains that production know-how as well as a well-stocked roster of providers gives the prospective client more of a reason to point and click in their direction. He says that NatureFootage.com will start with a roster of roughly 25 cinematographers and should approach OceanFootage.com's number - 100 - by year's end. "It was a natural leap for us to move into that area."

Speaking of leaps and moves, the larger players are also heading aggressively towards offering cleaner and more convenient online functionality.

"We're looking at [the online] market very seriously in 2006. We've transferred a lot of material into HD and everything has been digitized for quick turnaround," says Jocelyn Shearer, director of worldwide sales for the recently re-christened National Geographic Digital Motion library. Shearer says that involves undertaking "a mass digitization project" for their storefront. "By spring it will click through to a clean search engine that will only source files for which we have complete, uncompressed digital masters."

At Getty Images, director of global film marketing Kristl Date-Dopps says the company has developed a global usability team dedicated to better understanding and improving customers' online workflow. For example, based on customer feedback Getty recently began offering clean, non-watermarked preview files in full-screen NTSC and PAL formats via the Internet.

Footage to go

The movement towards fully digitized libraries can't happen overnight, especially for the larger companies with hundreds of thousands of hours of footage in various formats. And for those that do have their entire inventory in digital form, the crunch is on now for smaller files that can not only fulfill rough edit requirements but can also be adaptable to new emerging media platforms like the Video iPod and the PlayStation Portable - two outlets that weren't even on the table a year ago - and of course, the mobile market. "We did a lot of business with the mobile markets [this past year]," says Thought Equity's Schaff. "We looked at the statistics - there are two mobile phones to every television in the world today. Every one of those LCD screens becomes a consumer of footage."

BBC Motion Gallery's West Coast director of sales, Kristy Manning, says that the demand for licensed content is growing exponentially. "We have both our existing clients and new clients asking for new rights for wireless technology, VOD, iPod rights, mobile phone, et cetera," she says. "It's similar to when home video and Internet rights came about - it's just a matter of getting clearances for these new emerging technologies."

Both Thought Equity and Colorado-based Mammoth HD are offering up video iPod reels for potential clients and customers. But just like any other product offering, once you give up something for free, you hope to get 'em back for more at a price. Getty Images recently struck a deal with the newly launched Google Video Store, making a portion of its Archive Films collection available via that portal.

HD Rising

Which leads to the next question regarding the present and near future of the stock footage industry - what are clients buying and, in turn, what are the houses acquiring? As for format, most of the houses we talked to still report strong sales for standard def, and are interested in seeing how burgeoning mobile and portable video markets impact that category. And as for HD, all the companies report that major new acquisitions are increasingly being made in the format, and that new providers are becoming more adept - and insistent - at shooting with it. National Geographic's Shearer says their recent material shot by the world-renowned Lindblad Expeditions team is all HD, and that while upconverting material from the archives can be "the bane of everyone's existence, it's also pretty exciting."

"As more directors, producers and their clients become educated in shooting and posting in the HD format and the whole thing becomes de-mystified, the greater the adoption will be," says Getty's Date-Dopps.

As for the actual demand for new or upconverted HD content, while AWV's Dalton says, "I've found that we haven't been getting anywhere near the number of HD requests that people seem to be talking about," others such as Phil Bates, president of Myrtle Creek, OR-based Artbeats, say the international HD biz is booming. "The international markets, specifically Japan, have really grown more with HD," he offers. "Here [in the US] it's a little bit slower, but it's still becoming a significant portion of what we sell. We've probably converted up to 90% of what we can."

As for in-demand content, many of those polled backed up the assertion of Framepool COO Goetz Schmidt Bossert - "There has been a resurgence of the animal in advertising" - which is unsurprising for a year in which the sleeper hit movie was cast entirely with penguins.

But the big news isn't all about cute, fuzzy creatures. BBC Motion Gallery recently announced a deal with the prestigious Nugus/Martin archive, making it the global distributor for a collection that spans 100 years of history, ranging from scenes of Czar Nicholas and family in 1896 to recent battle clips from Afghanistan. Getty Images brought materials to the recent AOL UK Discuss campaign spots (see pg. 46), as well as to feature films such as Memoirs of a Geisha and War of the Worlds. And in the sports realm, there's Thought Equity's aforementioned NCAA Sports acquisition covering 88 different championships over 23 different sports, and Framepool has recently made available what it calls "premium soccer footage" just in time for this year's World Cup.

Perhaps a nice, tidy encapsulation of the bold moves being made in the field comes from Artbeats' Bates. In the interest of getting the perfect lightning shot for an upcoming collection, the company recently devised a method to get a $100,000 camera eight feet away from a lightning-generating Tesla coil.

"I don't think anyone's ever been that brave or stupid before to put a $100,000 camera that close to two million volts of electricity," enthuses Bates about his own recent slam dunk. "We're always willing to do stuff like that, even if it's a little risky."

Absolutely Wild Visuals> www.absolutelywildvisuals.com
Artbeats> www.artbeats.com
BBC Motion Gallery> www.bbcmotiongallery.com
Framepool> www.framepool.com
Getty Images> www.gettyimages.com
National Geographic Digital Motion> www.ngdigitalmotion.com
Ocean Footage> www.oceanfootage.com
Thought Equity> www.thoughtequity.com