Web-o-mercials

YouTube was going to get video commercials; it was just a matter of when. The when turned out to be last month, driven in part by the urgent need to advertise Paris Hilton's new television channel to its native demographic — a demographic that's apparently more YouTube than television, but can be herded back to TV when given a good enough reason. I guess that's the logic.

Also last month, Sony bought rival video-sharing network Grouper for a reported $65 million, hedging the company's bets against the possibility that user-created media will be bigger than studio-created media, by a lot. No doubt there will be video commercials at Grouper too, though Sony didn't commit to that, saying only it would leave things status quo but look at new options and possibilities for growth. Read: commercials.

I imagine that some of these commercials will be much like the broadcast commercials we're used to — maybe even just downconverted versions of those very spots. But not for long. The art form of web-o-mercials will develop at the opposite end of the continuum from infomercials in every way. They'll be short and interactive and chock-full of production values, if not resolution.

Jocelyn Shearer, vice president of worldwide sales at National Geographic Digital Motion (NGDM), gets the picture, so to speak. While the archive arm of National Geographic will always serve its traditional role for scientists and long-form documentarians, she understands that the market for reusing quality footage is going to be what she whimsically calls a tidal wave. “Get a surfboard,” she says. As a stock footage veteran — she worked at Corbis and Getty — Shearer can see how motion footage will become a ubiquitous element of all communication — business-to-business, user-created content, moving billboards, and cell phone and web commercials.

Kevin Schaff, founder and CEO of Thought Equity, an upstart stock licensing company, sees the same thing. Already, Thought Equity sells unique do-it-yourself commercial kits to broadcasters — collections of quality footage elements that can be made into original commercials for a fraction of the cost of production. For those who want to shop for footage online and/or use it for online production, Thought Equity offers its web-savvy Speed View — which allows the clips to play back when you mouse over them. The company also provides the clips in a range of codecs that you can compare on the fly, so you can choose the compression that best suits the content of the clip.

Now NGDM and Thought Equity are working together to serve a remix trend that in theory will migrate from cable and business-to-business into an online mosh pit of consumers and professionals duking it out on YouTube to make the most irresistible content. With decades of great, expensive, hard-won cinematography at their disposal, this new generation of remix artists will be limited only by their own concept of irresistible.

For more on NGDM and Thought Equity, see our cover story on p. 66.