“Nimia” Offers Videographers A Venue To Store, Share, And Sell Their Footage

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got hard drives full of footage from personal or other non-commercial projects, that don’t serve much use once the project they were shot for is completed. I’ve considered trying to license it as stock footage, but never really taken the time to do it. After checking out the site Nimia and interviewing one of their staff however, I decided to give it a try.

Nimia has been around for about 12 months, but I had never heard of them (they apparently haven’t done much marketing besides word of mouth.) They consider themselves to be a grass-roots organization, and are starting to build a sizeable community of users. Joel Wiebe is Head Account Execituve for Nimia, and we spent some time chatting so I could get a better idea of what Nimia has to offer. He explained to me in a nutshell what it is designed to do:

Nimia combines a digital asset management system, with the ability to store and share media, with a Getty-type licensing service. We service freelance videographers, photographers doing timelapses, as well as some of the largest agencies in the world, who all need a way to store and transfer assets.

To me this initially sounded like a lot of different things, and their website bombarded me with a lot information that I had hard time digesting. I wondered why I wouldn’t just use a service like box.com or Google Drive for storing and sharing assets. And with many options for licensing my video clips, why would I want to use Nimia instead? With a bit of a background in video production himself, Joel understood my concerns and easily laid them to rest by explaining how these different things can be related and what Nimia does to make it a sort of one-stop-shop.

To paraphrase Joel, you can use Nimia as place to upload your media clips to the cloud, giving you a backup of it, but also the ability to share this media with others (Much like the aforementioned services, but designed on a platform specifically built for video content.) Since Nimia is made for video producers, the interface and options are designed with them in mind, so clips play back smoothly, description information is readily available, and all sorts of meta tags are searchable. You can then designate specific clips to publish to their marketplace, which is where your content can be sold under a few different licenses. These options are like what you would find selling through Getty or Artbeats. What makes Nimia better is the level of control that you keep over your own assets. You can privately store clips or publish to the marketplace, and you don’t have to be exclusive with Nimia if you don’t want to be. The video below might help to explain what they are all about.

Joel then directed me to their website, which explains specifically how your media can be searched:

The archival system is unique in that it allows producers to search for videos based on keyword, location, camera type, light source, motion control, and focus parameters.

To really see how this worked, I got myself an account an uploaded a clip. The upload process was fairly simple, and the design of the upload queue and its options were well featured. Once online, there were plenty of choices for entering in searchable data so potential buyers could find my clip on the marketplace. There was about a 48-hour waiting period for my video to be approved to be listed on their marketplace, and while I was waiting for that, I noticed the video was getting "kudos" from other users who had found it. Excited at first, I realized that I couldn't see who was looking at my video, but it did tell me that it was being seen. Here's a screenshot from the video I uploaded. (Click to enlarge)

Here is some more notable information I got from Joel that seemed relevant to potential users.

• You get 25GB of storage space for free, but any content you make available on the marketplace does NOT count against that.

• Nimia has a forum where potential buyers can make requests for specific types of video clips they want to license.

• When a clip of yours is sold, you keep 50% of the sale price if your clip is exclusive to Nimia. If it is not exclusive, you keep 35%.

• If you live in a place where bandwidth is an issue, they will accept hard drives. Just ship it, they will trim and upload your media, and then they will ship your drive back.

Besides the free option, there are a few different levels of pricing for paid subscriptions, and this chart shows you the differences below:

One interesting thing to note about using an agency level subscription is that if you “sell direct,” you can license assets to a client and set your own terms, cost, and distribution. In this case the split is 90/10, so you would keep 90% of the sale price. I think the agency level is aptly named, as it's rather cost-prohibitive for individuals, but comes with options that a production house could definitely benefit from. My only issue here are the transfers– sending files or a group of files to someone I wish was a bit more affordable, and not limited to 2 for the studio subscription level.

Here is a link to their licensing options and payout info.

The more I used Nimia, the more I could see how not only myself, but production houses that I do remote editing for, could use certain features. I'll call out transfers again– when a client needs me to add say, 5 more clips into an remote edit I'm working on, the ability to upload clips that I can preview right in Nimia, and then send/receive messages right through their IM window would make that experience very smooth for both parties.

Overall I had a good experience using their site, and any minor issues or questions I had were quickly resolved by their customer service reps. I think I'll continue to post clips there, as it takes little effort on my part, it is free for me to do, and I might make a little money off of it.

In the future Nimia plans to implement multiple codecs and resolutions that will be automatically generated on their end so you have more options for potential buyers. To learn more about Nimia, check out their website. Feel free to post any questions you might have, and I'll do my best to answer them based on what I've learned thus far.