Orchard Clips will be headed by Luke Smedley, a content and operations manager with experience in the monetisation of film and video footage.
New clip sales business, Orchard Clips, has launched, offering both historical and contemporary content highlighting Middle Eastern culture and diversity. It has provided documentary producers, news channels, publishers, and brands with more than 10,000 clips at launch, with hundreds more to be added every week.
Orchard Clips aims to become the go-to destination for video clips from and about the region as the demand for this high-quality content continues to grow.
Orchard Clips will draw on its sister company, OR Media’s 30-year archive of documentary footage and access to people, places, and events across the Middle East. The Orchard Clips team has scoured thousands of hours of footage for exclusive and elusive clip content from events throughout the region’s history to the everyday lives of its citizens.
OR Media is also currently documenting Saudi Arabia’s societal transformation, Vision 2030, and has been granted access to major cultural, historical and archaeological projects, many of which have gone unrecorded and unseen by the outside world. With over 150 hours of documentaries currently in production, Orchard Clips will make this footage, shot to the highest quality by award-winning filmmakers, readily available to worldwide content producers.
In addition to the exclusive content from OR Media, Orchard Clips will also be collaborating with high-profile third parties for content acquisitions and partnerships. The company is committed to helping Middle Eastern content owners turn their archives from a “cost sink” into a revenue-generating resource. They also plan to offer new user-generated content (UGC).
Head of Orchard Clips and former AP archive manager, Luke Smedley, will lead a team of industry experts, with experience in managing, preserving, and monetising audio-visual content.
He explained: “Right now, lenses – both figuratively and literally – are focused on the Middle East. With the World Cup in Qatar, protests continuing in Iran and the mega-building projects of Saudi Arabia, the whole world is watching the region with interest. We’re committed to providing video producers with the right footage to tell the stories of the Middle East. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to be able to make the prestigious archive of OR Media available for the first time. The collection goes beyond the headlines and tells the intimate stories of the diverse people of this fascinating region.”
To ensure that customers can quickly and easily find and licence the content they need, Orchard Clips has partnered with Veritone, a major player in developing AI tools and services for video clip content ‘search and find’. The user-friendly platform will offer content that is both searchable and licensable online in English with an Arabic version coming soon.
