State of the state: Media

Thought Equity Motion has digitized one of the largest libraries of stock footage on the planet – “millions of hours,” says Dan Weiner, the company’s VP of marketing and products.

The Denver-based company, founded in 2003, has grown into an industry leader and continues to rack up partnerships with the top media brands on the planet, including the NCAA, The New York Times and the BBC, and help them monetize assets often previously mothballed.

Serving a client base of publishers and other content producers, Thought Equity Motion turned the NCAA’s massive de-centralized library of video and film footage into the NCAA Vault, covering every sport and filled with easily searchable tags and metadata – so a search for “dunk” or “three-pointer” would turn up a staggering number of appropriate highlights.

This revolutionizes the ways a large video library can be utilized, Weiner says. “You speed up and automate how you search your assets,” he says. “If you’ve got an entire game with all of the metadata, you can pull relevant content out much more efficiently.” For March Madness, Thought Equity Motion’s platform powered the NCAA-CBS website, which Weiner calls “a video jukebox of the last decade of games.”

“It’s a showcase for the content and the delivery mechanism,” Weiner adds. “It’s really the first application of the next generation of embeddable video.” Like Twitter, the company’s application programming interfaces, better known as APIs, are open, allowing developers to embed video into websites with a great deal of flexibility and creative freedom. Weiner says “contextual media,” where a story on a publisher’s website is supplemented by appropriate embedded video clips, is “the new frontier” for the industry.

The fruit of Thought Equity Motion’s partnership with the BBC is www.bbcmotiongallery.com, an online library that includes a sizable chunk of news footage and short programs. The company announced in February it would start bringing The New York Times content to market. There will not only be finished video programs featured on the paper’s site, but also all of the raw footage that hit the cutting room floor during postproduction. Weiner says The Times’ library will allow filmmakers to create “an instant documentary,” adding, “It’s a way to additionally monetize that content.”

Weiner says Thought Equity Motion, now about 100 employees strong (and hiring), is poised for a big year in 2010. “A lot of things are coming to fruition. We’re excited about it.”
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