Happy Holidays from Footage.net!

All of us at Footage.net join in wishing you peace, joy, and the warmth of family and friends this holiday season. We’re deeply grateful for the continued support of both our footage partners and the footage researchers who use our site, and are looking forward to the new year with a sense of cautious optimism.

More than ever, we’re amazed and heartened by the resilience, grit and commitment of the global footage community. From the start of the pandemic, footage providers around the world have moved mountains to operate their businesses remotely and continue serving customers. Their efforts made a huge difference early on as program makers rallied to fill programming gaps with archive-based content. As things returned to quasi-normalcy this year, it felt like that spirit of determination and common purpose endured.

Whether we are or are not in the “Golden Age of Archives,” the consensus seems to be that archives remain in high demand. And we can see the results all around us, with a cornucopia of great archival documentaries available across all delivery platforms. Archival docs, arguably the lifeblood of our industry, have caught on with both audiences and critics, and are now routinely showing up in Netflix’s Top 10 list and sweeping up major awards, including an Oscar for Best Documentary (Summer of Soul), mulitple Emmys and a Grammy for Best Music Film (Summer of Soul). It’s deeply satisfying to see a form that we all know and love break through to a wider audience and become part of the broader cultural conversation. So, here’s to hoping that this trend is here to stay.  

All that said, myriad challenges remain. Figuring out how to help footage users find the right content, and global footage providers reach active researchers, remain our top priorities. To that end, we’ll be releasing our redesigned site in early 2023, and hope it will make a difference. Until then, stay safe, warm and healthy and have a wonderful holiday season.