Footage and photos are bought by a different part of the market from the company-data programs most of this site covers. This page explains who buys video, how volume is counted, and why the people in your footage matter more than the camera that shot it.
Last checked: 7 October 2026. Buyer terms are quoted as published on that date.
People searching how to sell videos to AI companies usually mean one of two things. The answer differs a lot between them.
| Footage licensors | Company-data programs | |
|---|---|---|
| Who they are | Video and image data licensing specialists and stock-media libraries that supply training footage. | Programs such as micro1, Mode and Grepped that buy records of company work. |
| What they want | Large volumes of rights-cleared footage or images, with good metadata. | Documents, messages, tickets, project histories; buyer source lists include Zoom recordings and transcripts. |
| How volume is counted | Hours of video, numbers of images. | A data package scoped by systems, teams and years. |
| What decides fit | Rights clarity, technical quality, variety, uniqueness. | Published criteria: employee counts, years of records, location, language. |
| Typical seller | Production studios, photographers, drone operators, media archives. | Operating companies with 20 to 1,000 staff and several years of records. |
If your footage is your product, such as a studio’s archive or a photographer’s library, footage licensors are the natural buyers. We have no referral relationship with any of them and do not list them. If your video is part of how your company works, such as recorded process walkthroughs, site inspections or equipment training, it may fit inside a wider company-data package. Platform-scale deals are a separate scale again; our AI data licensing deals tracker lists publicly reported ones with sources.
Some businesses hold video that is neither a stock library nor a meeting recording. A field-service company may have years of technicians filming fault diagnosis for colleagues. A manufacturer may record line changeovers or quality checks. A construction firm may keep site-progress photos attached to daily reports. An internal training team may hold hundreds of screen-recorded walkthroughs of how a system is used.
Material like this is closer to the procedures and project records that company-data programs describe wanting than to footage sold by the hour. Its value usually depends on what it is attached to: the work order, the inspection report, the ticket or the SOP it illustrates. If you have it, scope it together with those records, keep the rights questions on this page in mind, and ask each program whether it accepts it before you prepare it.
Training consumes volume, so footage is first counted in hours and images in units. Then every hour is not equal. We do not quote a per-hour price: no source we track publishes one, and figures passed around online rarely say what the footage was.
The same rule practitioners give for all data applies here: never send the full library before you have a price. Share a manifest (hours by category, years, formats, rights status) and a few sample clips, then get more than one offer. Our guide to getting more than one offer explains how to compare them on terms, not just price.
A file can be yours while the faces and voices in it raise rights of their own. General information, not legal advice. Talk to your own lawyer before you sign.
A model release signed for an ad campaign or a single film may not cover licensing for AI training. Read what each release actually grants, and to whom.
Staff filmed at work agreed to be filmed for a purpose. Licensing that footage is a new use; notice, and in some places consent, may be needed.
Identifiable people in the background, customers in a store or visitors on site never agreed to anything. Footage with them in frame is the hardest to clear.
Footage showing children should be treated as excluded, whatever releases exist.
Some state biometric privacy laws can apply to face geometry and voiceprints. Ask your lawyer whether any apply to your footage and to the buyer’s intended use.
CCTV was installed for safety, not for sale. It records people who could not opt out. Most sellers leave it out entirely.
Photos follow the same rules with three differences. First, they are counted by number, so duplicates and near-identical bursts distort the count even more than with video. Remove them before you quote a total. Second, the metadata inside image files can reveal more than the picture: camera serial numbers, GPS coordinates of homes or client sites, and names in caption fields. Decide whether that metadata stays, and check it in your samples. Third, photo libraries often mix work you own with images clients supplied for a project, such as product shots or headshots they sent you. Those were never yours.
Faces matter as much in a photo as in a clip. Portraits, event photos and staff headshots are the categories most likely to need a release that covers this use, and the least likely to have one.
Production and agency contracts often assign footage, or exclusive rights in it, to the client. Those projects are not yours to license. Agencies face the same question for every deliverable, covered in our marketing and creative agencies guide.
Footage shot by freelancers may remain theirs unless their contract assigned it. Check before including any project they worked on.
Stock clips, photos and music beds you licensed for your productions cannot be relicensed. Finished edits that contain them need the licensed parts removed or the edit excluded.
Visible artworks, branded products and footage filmed on private property under a location agreement can each carry conditions. Note them in the manifest.
Describe them separately in the manifest, count their hours separately, and ask each buyer which it wants.
More hours, more variety, multiple takes and natural sound. It also holds the most unvetted material: slates with client names, crew talking between takes, passers-by who never made the cut, and people who were never meant to be on screen. Raw footage needs the most careful review of people and audio.
Fewer hours, but selected, graded and usually cleared for at least one use. Edits are also where third-party material collects: licensed music, stock inserts, client logos and graphics. An edit is only as licensable as its least-owned element.
Audio deserves its own decision. Sound recorded on set or on site captures conversations, names and voices that the picture alone would not. If a buyer does not need the audio track, removing it from the delivery removes a whole category of questions, including the voice-related ones raised above. If it does need audio, review it as you would a call recording, not as background noise.
Proxies, transcodes and backup drives of the same shoot can double or triple an hour count. Count unique footage only.
A release signed years ago for one campaign rarely mentions licensing for AI training. Read it before you count that footage as cleared.
Owned footage, client deliverables and licensed stock stored in the same project folder end up in the same export unless someone separates them first.
Picture gets reviewed; sound does not. Conversations on set can include names, phone numbers and opinions about clients.
Slates, logos and products from client shoots can tie footage to a client even when the contract question was answered.
Sample clips go after an NDA; the library goes after a signed agreement. Practitioners advise never sending a full dataset before a price.
No price is shown: nobody can value footage without reviewing it. The example shows how much an honest rights review can shrink an archive, and why the smaller set is the one worth offering. The studio also stripped on-set audio from the B-roll, since no buyer had asked for it, and kept its unreleased people footage on a separate list to revisit if new releases are ever signed.
These programs buy records of work, not footage libraries. Quoted from their own pages, checked 7 October 2026.
micro1 lists 30+ employees, documented processes and primarily English, with US companies first, and publishes “$100K-$2M+ for approved data packages” on its referral page. Mode lists 20+ full-time US office employees and several years of records the company owns, and publishes “$100K-$5M.” Grepped lists any vertical and publishes “$20K-$5M.” If recorded work, such as process walkthroughs or inspection video, sits alongside your documents and tickets, ask each program whether it wants it.
Independent site. Some links are referral links: if your company signs with a buyer through them, the buyer may pay us a fee. You are not charged, and we never see your data.