Information Madness

Critical Past has launched one of the largest collections in the world comprising of royalty-free historic footage and photos. The collection is available at www.criticalpast.com and features thousands of hours of video and still images which are available for free viewing and download.

Some of the history’s most iconic moments are included in the collection from more than 4000 locations worldwide. All the materials date back from the 1890s to modern times. The main themes are: Early motion pictures, World War I. World War II, the cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War, the Great depression, American presidents and so on.

The collection is made from more than 57,000 video clips which are drawn from government sources and are fully digitized , which makes it easy for customers to search the vast collection and then stream or download a certain video. Downloads can occur in minutes rather than days or weeks. Critical past offers more than 10 image formats for every clip on its website. Thanks to the use of a unique technology Critical past was able to generate a collection of more than seven million historic still images which are drawn from video images.

Andy Ericsson, Co-founder of Critical past said that the market was ready for this fresh approach that deals with the numerous hurdles, inconsistent pricing schemes and waiting times that the users should endure in order to get heir hands on these footages. He said also that other provider delivers this kind of service and that the status has been challenged by them. Critical past offers a variety of standard and high definition formats for professional users. The prices of the professional clips vary between USD 30 and USD 180 depending on the duration and format of the clips. The average duration of one clip is 3 minutes allowing the customers to pay only for the particular scenes and not the whole footage.

These professional screeners which have time code burned in can preview images for the symbolic price of 5 dollars. Jim Ericksson, co-founder of the Critical Past stated that they have made easy the search for a particular video by making the collection browsable and introducing the keyword search option.

Other features such as your Birthday in history search tool and ‘this week in history RSS feed has also been integrated. Each video clip on Critical past has its own page with photo images. Each page has a ‘related links’ and ‘related clips’ tools to help the users to find a certain footage on Critical Past or help the researching of clip’s subject through direct links to third party resources such as Google maps and Wikipedia. Crowd sourcing features enable the users to add changes and other details in the description of a certain clip. They also have the option t discus the clip in the forum of the site.

Critical Past receives orders form around the world. It ships professionally printed photos in rigid mailers and video files on USB flash drives. All the video clips and still images are free of royalty.