Dover, DE—CriticalPast launched one of the world’s largest online resources for royalty-free, historic footage and photos. Available now at CriticalPast.com, the collection spans thousands of hours of video and millions of still images, all of which are available for free viewing online, or for immediate download.
CriticalPast includes some of history’s most iconic moments from over 4,000 locations worldwide and dating as far back as the 1890s. Key themes in the collection include Early Motion Pictures, World War I, World War II—including scores of clips related specifically to D-Day and Pearl Harbor—the Korean War, Vietnam War, American Presidents, the Great Depression, Civil Rights and the Cold War.
The site’s library of more than 57,000 video clips is drawn from government sources and digitized, making it easy for users to search CriticalPast’s extensive collection, then stream or download a video. Videos in a customer’s requested format are available for download in minutes, rather than in days or weeks. CriticalPast offers downloads in a choice of more than 10 image formats for every clip on its website.
“The market is ready for a fresh approach that addresses the numerous hurdles, inconsistent pricing schemes and waiting times that professionals and consumers currently endure when trying to secure video footage and images,” said Andy Erickson, cofounder of CriticalPast. “No other provider delivers the kind of service we’re offering at CriticalPast, and we’re challenging the status quo in the archival stock footage and stock photo business.”
As a result of its unique technology, CriticalPast has generated a never-before-seen collection of over 7 million historic still images, which are created from moving video images at a cadence of one per second.
For professional TV and film producers, CriticalPast offers a variety of standard- and high-definition broadcast-ready formats. Professional clips are priced between $30 to $180, depending on duration and format, which represents a significant savings compared to most stock footage providers. Clips average about three minutes in length, allowing professionals to buy only the scenes they need and not pay for an entire reel of footage. Professional “screeners,” with time code burned in, are offered for $5, providing producers with convenient, low-cost preview images for the edit suite.
“We’ve made it easy for users to find clips on CriticalPast by including a description for each video and making the collection browsable as well as searchable by keywords, dates, locations, and more,” said Jim Erickson, cofounder of CriticalPast. “To further engage users, we’ve also integrated features such as a Your Birthday in History search tool on the homepage, along with a This Week in History MediaRSS subscription feed.”
Each video clip on CriticalPast is featured on its own page with related still photo images. Each page features Related Clips and Related Links tools to assist users in finding related footage or in further researching a clip’s subject matter through direct links to third-party resources such as Wikipedia and Google Maps. Crowd-sourcing features allow users to provide improvements and additional details for any clip’s description, and discuss any clip with others in the CriticalPast forum.
In addition to online streaming and downloads, CriticalPast can ship orders worldwide, including professionally printed photos in rigid mailers and video files on USB flash drives. All video clips and still images purchased through CriticalPast are royalty free.
criticalpast.com
Print | posted @ Monday, June 14, 2010 3:08 AM