Using stock footage is a quick and easy way to put together videos for the web…it’s widely available and you can find clips on just about anything. It also happens to be expensive. I recently spent several hundred dollars on just a handful of clips for a project.
But there is a new web site that is aiming to solve this high-price-per-clip problem. It’s called Unlimited Stock Media and they are promising unlimited access to thousands of royalty-free, HD clips for as low as $49 a month (that’s far less than you’d typically pay for a single, professionally shot HD clip).
Is it too good to be true? It’s hard to say as their site isn’t officially open yet (as of the date I’m writing this)…it’s still in the pre-launch phase. But they claim it will open within days.
However, in exchange for your email address, they will send you a free HD clip (yes you actually receive the clip and no you don’t get bombarded with emails).
If you’d like learn more, you can visit their site by clicking here.
*UPDATE – On September 29, 2009 Unlimited Stock Media officially opened their doors. They are offering two payment plans…$49 for 24 hours of unlimited downloads or $197 for 30 days of unlimited downloads. It appears they are offering around 1,400 HD clips.
It sounds good, but it all depends on the quality of the stock footage that they have available. I’m looking forward to checking it out.
I can think of one site, http://stockfootageforfree.com that offers completely free stock footage, but the catch is that they only have a few dozen clips. But I think that even if StockFootageForFree had 1,000 clips, it’s hard to say how useful they would be. Some of the clips that they offer are too strange, and the focus of the clips too disorganized to fit easily into a project.
wow…that could really be a game changer for many players in this space. Hard to believe this is a do-able business model to pull off with enough selection of quality product. Look forward to seeing how it works out. For most of my pro-grade projects, I have to pay up for good stuff from the likes of Getty, etc. and I usually get what I pay for.
I use stockfootageforfree.com all the time…the HD stuff is perfect for my small needs 🙂 I just went ahead and ordered one of their “free” DVDs of which the free downloadable stuff is only a sample. We’ll see if it’s worth my $8.41 for shipping & handling!
Really looking forward to this new site and checking out what they have. I also follow pond5.com, revostock.com, and phoenixclips.com for their weekly freebies. This new site would have to be pretty impressive for me to spend $49 even though that is a great price in this business…just really don’t have a lot of cash.
Thanks, Dave, for this great site!
I had to check this out for myself so I went to the site http://www.unlmimitedstockmedia.com and signed up. They have a nice demo reel playing on their splash page. After signing up I received an email with a link to a free HD download. The quality was great. Seems very legitimate.
I agree with Pete.N … tried it out and got a great HD clip of New York CIty street scene at night. Interesting angle and good quality. The demos on the splash page left me wanting more. Hmmm…. $49… maybe… 🙂
Their site launched. You can check it out here http://www.unlimitedstockmedia.com
Pretty sweet deal. 24hr pass for only 49 bucks. That gives you 24 hours to download as much high definition stock footage as you want.
Even if you don’s sign up it’s worth visiting the site to check out the clips.
Hope this helps
Sad to see that it was indeed $49 for 24 HOURS, not $49 for one MONTH as was originally thought. 🙁