Getty Images’ deal with ITN Source unpicked
ITN’s decision to hand over the licence and distribution rights for its news archive to Getty Images has alarmed researchers and raised questions about the shape of the industry.
“On the surface, a monopoly makes the research process faster as more content is made available through fewer databases and interfaces,” says
James McDonald, an archive producer whose credits include The Program and Ronaldo. “But the implications are very worrying,” he adds. “This is going to have a negative effect on smaller businesses and could force smaller archives to sell out to some of the bigger suppliers just as a way to get their content out there.”
The ITN archive comprises 1 million news clips spanning 61 years, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam war and the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami.
While ITN retains ownership, sales will be outsourced to Getty from July, leading to the closure of in-house clip rights division ITN Source and the loss of 30 jobs.
“ITN was looking for a long-term partnership that would grow its archive business and believes Getty Images is the right partner for the stewardship and dissemination of its archive content,” says Getty’s director of video content development Lee Shoulders.
“We will be able to leverage our global distribution platform and world-class sales force to expand the market for ITN’s video footage.”
ITN’s technical team will spend the next few months uploading hundreds of thousands of clips to Getty’s site. “Files will be temporarily uploaded to Amazon S3 cloud storage to facilitate the transfer of ITN’s complete library,” says Shoulders.
“In addition, ITN’s tape-based material will be made available as searchable text records through our analogue search and fulfilment workflow.”
What concerns researchers, though, is that vital knowledge possessed by ITN Source staff will be lost in transition.
“Getty’s footage collections are now going to be so immense and ever-expanding that it would not be possible for any one person to have a good overview of what it does, and doesn’t, hold,” says McDonald.
The personal touch
Paul Bell, the producer of documentaries including Senna and Amy, adds: “As a researcher, I want access to the material that I know is not on the website by finding the person who’s been with the archive the longest. Getty needs to make as much available as it can and keep the process transparent.”
For Carol O’Callaghan, a jury coordinator for trade association Focal International, “folk knowledge” is “lost in mega-libraries as staff cannot be familiar with the history of all the represented production companies”.
There are similar warnings from rival footage archives. “If no one from ITN Source moves with the archive and they rely on data transfer alone, that’s a recipe for disaster,” says Massimo Moretti, UK library commercial development manager at StudioCanal. “There will be a knowledge gap that they won’t be able to fill quickly.”
Alwyn Lindsey, vice-president, sales at Associated Press (AP), says archive owners underestimate the importance of personal interaction at their peril. “ITN personnel selling ITN’s own content would be knowledgeable and passionate – which is possibly a challenge for Getty.”
He implies that the link between ITN Source and the ITN newsroom, for planning ongoing news stories like Brexit, may be broken. “It’s not just knowledge of historical content that is important but also an understanding of what will be shot going forward.”
In response, Shoulders stresses that Getty’s ITN collection will be updated daily, “with agenda-setting news footage made available to our international customer base from 24 hours after it was first aired”.
Along with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ Corbis Images, the venture capital-backed Getty is credited with lifting image archives from a cottage industry to a global business by aggregating – through acquisition or licence – smaller collections, then digitising the assets and making them available for search on the web.
Getty’s purchases include Image Bank, Allsport and MediaVast. Since 2013, it has represented BBC Motion Gallery on behalf of BBC Worldwide, and in September it struck a similar deal with AP. A year ago, Getty acquired the rights to run Corbis, cementing its position as the world’s largest online image library.
“It takes a lot of investment to protect original assets and take them to market, which a larger company is better equipped to do,” suggests British Pathé general manager Alastair White. “The only way smaller libraries can survive is by getting everything online digitally and in HD.”
Getty’s dominance, and in particular the housing of BBC and ITN assets under one (foreign) roof, represents an existential threat, according to some. “By the summer, the gatekeeper of anything of importance in the recent history of this country will be not a public broadcaster, but an external agency,” says Bell. “If these assets were buildings rather than film, there might have been more government oversight.”
Licensing alternative
McDonald warns of “a considerable threat” to Britain’s audio-visual heritage – “not only in its exploitation by an American corporation, but in how accessible it is to film-makers to license, as Getty’s collection is tailored to sell to advertising and corporate productions.”
He adds: “They haven’t made the BBC’s collection any more accessible to film-makers than Motion Gallery was already doing and I don’t hold out much hope that their further acquisitions will be beneficial in that way either.”
The solution, he says, is to establish a publicly funded body in the mould of the French Institute National Audiovisual (INA), which licenses content from French broadcasters. “It strikes me as a much more ethical way to successfully license the content produced by our public service broadcasters.”
Others, though, see an inevitable and straightforward business move. “ITN Source has been an aggregator itself and the market continues to consolidate into a number of key players,” says Lindsey. “I don’t think a huge amount will change.”
AP is one of those players, recently acquiring rights to the British Movietone collection from Newsreel Archive.
StudioCanal’s Moretti anticipates little impact on the market, except a possible knock-on effect on fees. “If they adopt a very aggressive pricing policy, then the whole market value of a clip, regardless of its content, could reduce. It’s something I will have to monitor.”
Bell is also relaxed about the prospects. “Getty is a commercial library in the same way that ITN Source is a commercial library, so I can see that having Getty represent ITN is a good fi t from their point of view.”
There are unresolved implications for the future of collections represented by ITN Source. Broadcast understands that management of newsreels like Fox Movietone and British Paramount will revert to rights holders 21st Century Fox and Reuters.
Similarly, ITV Studios will take back control of collections from Rank, Korda, Carlton and Granada, ranging from the Carry On film series to Coronation Street.
Anticipating the move, and in parallel to ITN Source, Reuters began to sell its 1 million-clip archive through Reuters Media Express last September.
The wider challenge for archives like ITN’s, which accrue daily, is to process the rising tide of video.
Artificial intelligence tools such as voice, facial and pattern recognition are being introduced alongside basic timecode to automate metadata tagging, but there are doubts about whether any technology will be good enough to describe all the nuances of material on which archive producers depend.
“Machine cataloguing will always be a poor representation of emotions conveyed by a shot of a landscape, for example,” says O’Callaghan.
Getty uses an API that “significantly automates” content ingestion to its web platform. “This makes it very quickly available for customers to purchase and download,” explains Shoulders.
“Storage space costs and infrastructure have to be anticipated ahead of time so that we can keep up with such large volumes of daily intake. The ability to refi ne search in a way that we are displaying the most relevant content to a customer is a focus of ours, to ensure the correct clip can be found among the volume coming in.”
Ultimately, Getty’s swoop is a reflection of some major shifts in an industry striving to become more professional. “By doing that, you hope that it doesn’t become too streamlined and corporatised for researchers to be able to dig in the dirt to find the gold and gems,” says Bell. “If that is gone, you end up losing quite a bit of the archive world.”
ITN SOURCE: WHAT THE INDUSTRY SAYS
By the summer, the gatekeeper of anything of importance in the recent history of this country will be not a public broadcaster, but an external agency
PAUL BELL
DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER
DOCUMENTARY PRODUCER
ITN Source has been an aggregator itself and the market continues to consolidate into a number of key players. I don’t think a huge amount will change
ALWYN LINDSEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
If they adopt a very aggressive pricing policy, then the whole market value of a clip, regardless of its content, could reduce
MASSIMO MORETTI
STUDIOCANAL
STUDIOCANAL
Getty’s footage collections are now going to be so immense… that it would not be possible for any one person to have a good overview of what it does, and doesn’t, hold
JAMES MCDONALD
ARCHIVE PRODUCER
ARCHIVE PRODUCER
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