22 Dec 2015 Videoblocks Brings Discovery Channel’s Content to Marketplace

Videblocks has just announced their partnership with the Discovery Channel to add unused clips from the television network’s archive to the Videoblocks marketplace. The content will be rolled out over the coming months, and will be available on Videoblock’s marketplace rather than the wholly-owned, unlimited downloads collection.

The partnership comes soon after former Discovery Channel and Smithsonian Network producer, Gretta Pittard, became Videoblock’s Head of Content and Contributor Relationships, and it will take the Videoblocks stock footage marketplace past the one million files milestone less than a year since launch.

The Deal

Through this new partnership, Discovery Channel will be actively selling high quality wildlife, nature, travel and action sports clips on Videoblock’s marketplace, at the established price points for HD and 4K, generating revenues every time a clip is licensed, just like any other contributor.

All content is unused footage spanning 30 years of the network’s production, all shot by professional videographers with top-class –for the time– equipment. Videoblock’s review team is currently curating the more than 100,000 videos provided by Discovery and selecting the ones that meet their quality standards. The first 30,000 clips will roll out in early 2016.

Videoblocks says this is just the first of various similar partnerships they expect to close in the coming year, though there was no mention of exclusivity, meaning Discovery will likely send the same content to Shutterstock, Pond5 and Fotolia/Adobe Stock in time.

Fast Progress

Launched in April this year, the contributor-sourced marketplace that pays 100% royalties already has over 880K clips. With the Discovery content to take it passed a million, Videoblocks founder and CEO Joel Holland highlighted that Shutterstock took around six years to bring their collection to this figure.

While that’s true, so many years ago there wasn’t the quantity of people producing video footage as there are today, and Shutterstock is growing its video collection many times faster than Videoblocks, currently standing at over 3.6 million clips.