With the constraints due to nationwide lockdown, many marketers are facing difficulties to shoot their ad films. Many of them are depending on the stock footage that is available on various platforms. Companies and industry executives are saying that there is a huge demand for stock footage in video streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hotstar and Zee5, etc.
Stock footage refers to the reusable movie or video snippets that can be used for new products when the shooting material is not available or filmed afresh. This can be re-used without any copyright strike but needs to follow the guidelines prescribed by the original owner.
Since there are film shooting restrictions in society, many brands are depending on these stock footage. This resulted in a spike in the demand for the footage sellers like Getty Images and Shutterstock, from India over the last three months.
Stock & Found, a Reliance Entertainment company which is the “enterprise business partner” of Shutterstock in India, had three times an increase in sales of the footage during the lockdown than the same period last year. For Avinash Malani, founder of The Ad Footage Company, the licensed reseller for Depositphotos and Dreamstime in India, sales increased 150% in the last three months. Homegrown companies, like Imagesbazaar, Picxy, and resellers for other global companies such as Pond5 and Alamy, are also had a significant hike in demand from the media and entertainment industry
Malani said that the spike in demand was unprecedented. Normally March to June is a slow period for the businesses since it is considered an exam season. So, this is the first time they are dealing with big-budget projects in this season.
Aparna Acharekar, programming head at OTT channel ZEE5 said, “With no timeframe for shooting, stock footage comes in as a quicker, smarter, and safer way of creating transition or establishing shots”
There is a demand for both foreign and domestic footages in the market. Among these, shots of historical events, editorial content related to news-related developments from the past have high demand in these days.
Malani added, “In western countries, shooting is more expensive than procuring stock footage as it requires taking several permissions. In India, however, shooting was always cheaper than buying stock footage. Until now. We are expecting an overall high double-digit percentage gain in revenue by the end of this year”
