Pond5, 4K, and ShutterStock: My Humble Opinion

So, here we all are two months in with our GH4s, shooting and submitting wonderful 4K clips. I'm very happy with 4K, and love the flexibility if gives me as an editor, and as a contributor, the higher price points it sells at.

We all know that Pond5 was among the first, if not THE first, to happily accept 4K clips from us. And I appreciate how Pond5 is so "contributor-friendly." However, I feel that they are SERIOUSLY missing the boat with one aspect: downsampling.

I know it's only been two months since the GH4 came out (and even less for other 4K cameras like the AX100), but I see a troubling trend on the horizon.

We all know that ShutterStock now also accepts 4K. And to be honest, I feel their predetermined price point of $299 is a bit steep, but that's beyond my control. However, they do one thing that is greatly appreciated: they offer HD versions of my 4K clips without any additional work on my part. And it's because of that little feature that I think they will win-out with customers in the long run as we all move forward submitting more and more 4K footage.

That is, unless, Pond5 follows suit and does the same.

Of course, we've gone through this in the past with HD and SD. And some of us still submit manually-converted SD versions along side of HD clips (useless and wasteful at this point, in my opinion, but I digress). And we are now facing the same issue with 4K.

I started submitting 4K clips here without the desire to also submit HD versions. I feel the price point I chose for my 4K clips was high enough to justify 4K, yet not totally out of the reach for the buyer who just needs HD. But as I look at these past two months of doing this, I see that Pond5 is trending down, while ShutterStock is headed up.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/280996/2014-FirstHalf-4K.jpg As you can see, when I started to predominitaly shoot and submit 4K, Pond5 went down, while SS went up. I should also note that June of 2014 was not only my best month ever on SS, but I generated more income from SS in that month than I ever did in the past from ANY other agency.

Is this due to downsampling, or just a fluke? I realize the two months in question are summer months, which are typically low-earners (July is looking exceptionally grim). But, don't you think it's odd that a summer month (June) was such a great earner for me at SS, even at their lower commission rates?

Now, I've sold more 4K clips on Pond5 than I have so far on SS. But that just may be because I've ONLY submitted 4K versions of my clips to P5, while SS is offering HD (and lower) resolutions of those same clips.

So, I've decided to manually convert my 4K clips and submit them here, to see if that changes anything. But, as I've said many times in the past, having TWO versions of the SAME clip in search results only clutters these results. It's redundant, and also increases Pond5's storage needs, since we are sending them not only a huge 4K Quicktime, but also another HD file of the same thing. And, of course, it doubles MY workload, which was something I was trying to avoid.

I realize that I need to keep looking at these trends, as two months is NOT enough time to come to a conclusion. But I really think that regardless of what happens with me, Pond5 really needs to consider automatic downsampling of 4K to HD (but no further). It would not only be a great timesaver for contributors, but will also most likely be appreciated by customers.

And it's the customers we all need to keep happy.

ODesign,

Just keep on selling 4K at Pond5 only! Customers will be happy to use quality 4K to downsize to FHD. Your 4K price is just a FHD price for lot of contributors here in Pond5. IMO

Thanks for the comment. I probably won't be downsizing ALL my 4K clips, but I definitely will start doing batches.

At the very least, I think P5 should offer "on the fly" down conversions for buyers. Then, let us--the contributors--decide if the HD versions will be the same price as the 4K (much like they do with photos).

I feel the same. The difference is I believe the HD market at P5 is much stronger than the 4K market. With the huge files and slow ftp upload time I'm sending only HD to P5 at this time and 4K to SS. This way SS has all sizes and P5 has the better HD selling size. I really hate to be doing it this way but I have a limited bandwidth and have to use it in the best financial way for me. Indeed as soon as P5 does 4K downsizing to HD (no further size reduction) I will change stop uploading any HD clips and upload 4K only. We all know that HD and 4K clips have a much higher value than most believe, SS proves this. $299 might be a little high for most 4K but SS regularly sells HD clips for up to $500 for me.

I don't like to photo pricing with huge reduction in prices or all sizes at same price options. Give us the control of pricing our 4K and HD prices but the minimums need to be increased which will stabilize the market and increase profit for everyone. Setting a pricing template like RS would be a better choice.

" $299 might be a little high for most 4K but SS regularly sells HD clips for up to $500 for me. "

I don't understand this. Is SS so good in price of FHD ($500 ??) ? Don't they have a fixed price of FHD under $100?

They have alternate licensing options that P5 apparently doesn't (or at least, doesn't pursue).

Ya many of us have had SS commissions of $100 to my high of $174 for HD.

Ya no arguments about bottom sellers destroying the industry there. Much more peaceful.

I ranted about this a couple years ago... Pond5 does not have to spend money keeping multiple copies of each clip. Once purchased, they can have the server render out the smaller size and put it into the buyer's download area for however long they allow downloads.

In fact, they should have a "Pond5 Studio" where all of our purchased items go. And in that studio we should be able to manipulate our purchases in any fashion and have the Pond5 server handle the conversion. So, I could buy an HD clip and in my "Pond5 Studio" I can request a resize to 960x540 and re-encode to H.284 or Flash.

As a seller, I upload my highest resolution and simply select what formats I want to allow for prices. So, I can select that buyers only be offered 4k and 1080HD for pricing. But of course, once they buy it then can downsize it to whatever they want in their studio.

If I were a web developer at Pond5, I could code this in a few days for beta testing. It's literally THAT easy to do with modern web servers.

Great points everyone, we love hearing critical suggestions like these...

Downconversion is something that we have been working on, and we are really close to launching it. However, there are a few important details that we are trying to get right before we do so. We want to make sure that downconverted files have the right settings and codecs for the sake of maintaining the highest of both quality and color space.

Just some insight, we are planning to automatically downsize all 4K MOV uploads at 1080P and maybe even 720P and give you guys the ability to adjust prices for each version. Thoughts?

And so everyone knows, I handle Video Development at Pond5 so please feel free to directly contact me if you have any further suggestions or comments at avtandil@pond5.com

Good to know. Please keep us posted.

I vote to downsize to 1080 and 720 only, and let us decide the price points for both, letting us choose to make all versions the same cost if desired.