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When you’re working out start-up costs for your e-commerce video footage library there are four key issues to work on:

1. Cost of content acquisition
2. Archive management
3. Cost of software platform
4. Marketing

We’ll develop some more in-depth articles on each of these subjects over the next few months but let’s start some simple overviews.

Cost of content

You know, we really can’t help you here.

Whether you’re producing your own content, trawling the web or co-selling, the producer will have a price in mind. It is up to you what you pay and under which terms.

Archive management.

This is one area where, with forethought and the ability to make deals, you could reduce your overheads.

First, which media is your archive made up from?

If it’s all original film it could be very valuable indeed; but to ingest in a digital format might be problematic. If it is truly stunning unique content you might consider employing a full time professional archivist who can properly take care of the masters and restore as necessary prior to ingestion.

Buying film or video transfer equipment is very expensive; calculate it, but a quick Google search – or a call to us – will unearth a list of experts who will contract to do it. Charges are per linear foot. Most TV production companies outsource this task these days; the same is true for video tape.

The most expensive part of archive management is preparing your digital content for sale. For each clip you sell you will need to produce a high resolution version, a watermarked mid resolution preview version, a non-watermarked mid resolution preview version, a thumbnail video to display in search results and a thumbnail image also for search results display.

And later, you will have to add metadata (location, format, keyphrase, title, reference number, description, license type, shot type, time of day etc for each of the clips you have produced.

If you’re clipping an hour long video the basic time, even without the metadata and using batch upload software will take around 5 minutes per clip; to convert an hour long video to 30 second clips will take around 10 hours. And you have 300 hours to catalogue? That’s 18 month’s work right there.Plus metadata and uploading.

Surely there’s a faster way? Yes! TaDa!

Here’s a commercial break; our system allows you to upload the digitised video and automatically transcode all of the file types you need to sell with. Better, it will transfer all of the data embedded in the video and copy it into the system database.

Great, but wait.

There’s another even more important TaDa. 

TaDaDeDah even.

Our system will allow you to do all of this for a complete reel or programme. Once uploaded your customers can choose the seconds they want. You charge a premium for letting them choose their own seconds.

Let’s look at this a little more. To convert 300 hours of digital video using standard editing software will take 18 months. Add on the metadata input and it’s two years of time.

The salary cost alone will be around $100,000. Your clip cost now is acquisition + $2 per clip. Not so much the cost per unit... but the time to market and the wait for any return on your investment is truly prodigious.

But upload 300 hours via the transcoder and you’ll be done in two days.

Repeat that? 18 months or 2 days?

You choose.

Check out our next post about media library platform costs. And have a great week!