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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

NY Times Looks for Licensing Revenues in Web Video
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Steve Smith

Print brands are TV brands now. The Web has made multimedia production imperative, and with over 40

billion streams served in a given month in the U.S. alone, Web users have declared loudly that they want their Web video. But how do publishers make the most financially of the hours and hours of clips, stories and curious captures they pile up in their inventory? Just as text and images are being licensed more efficiently online, video syndication and licensing could become the next incremental revenue stream for many publishers. In a deal with Thought Equity Motion last month, The New York Times is making available raw footage and stories from its video library for licensing to other video producers, filmmakers, commercial content makers and educators.

The Times has been producing daily online video and TV shows for a while, says Christine Topalian, director, online strategy and U.S. sales, New York Times. “We have an archive with about three years of video and also New York Times TV and events, so we thought we had enough of an actual collection to move forward,” she says.

The Times itself will be deciding which video to make available for re-use, including finished reporting pieces and raw footage. “From our perspective it is capturing all of the video we have and then making an editorial decision in the newsroom about what is for sale and what is not," says Michael Greenspoon, general manager, The New York Times News Service and Syndicate. "Provided it gets newsroom approval, then all of it gets transmitted to Thought Equity where they catalog and sell it. Thought Equity then wraps the video in metatags and makes it available for licensing."

“Producers can download samples with watermarks and then license them online, making them accessible any time—day or night—they are working on a project,” says Dan Weiner, VP of marketing and products, Thought Equity Motion. “There are a range of typical uses for licensed footage, including ad agency creative and marketing materials to major film productions. In fact, most of the Oscar-nominated films this year used licensed footage.”

For The New York Times, licensing video represents incremental revenue, but it is a smarter use of the assets the company is creating every day. For syndication to larger media entities worldwide, the Times has a dedicates sales team. Greenspoon says that Times reporters are deployed worldwide and they are returning rare and unique footage that no one else is getting. “Through this partnership we are able to monetize that.”

The amount of revenue possible from video licensing varies according to usage rights and medium. According to Thought Equity a given clip might cost up to $3,200 for re-use in an ad project to be broadcast on TV while a corporate or non-profit organization could license the same item for one-time use at $149.

While the income is incremental, Topalian says that partnering with a third party licensing platform like this allows the company to take greater control of its assets and get the most from them. The company had been getting more requests for their footage. “The fact is we were selling this reactively. Requests were coming in from a wide range of people. This is an opportunity to be more proactive about the way we are selling.”

Thought Equity Motion also licenses footage for National Geographic, Marvel Entertainment and Smithsonian Channel.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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COMMENTS

Or, a person who wants video could just look harder for something FREE-but-similar on the web. Licensing is a time-honored scheme based entirely on scarcity, not abundance. Memo to NYT (and apologies to the Buggles): Internet killed the scarcity star.

Posted by Doug on Thursday, March 18, 2010 @ 12:36 PM

Let's see; 24.95 a month for my NYT Online ISP and Home Page. Sounds fair. That's $250,000,000 million a year for starters. Now add in some ad revenue from (Google, Yahoo, MSN?) clicks and we're talking big money here-maybe.

Posted by Barry Dennis on Friday, April 2, 2010 @ 02:31 PM

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