Sorry for chiming in so late on this topic, but I've been enmeshed in deadlines.
You're always gonna get someone undercutting, giving away or allowing free usage of both photographic and video materials. How can you stop that? You can't, pure and simple.
It may indeed be true that some people will sell their works for less than they're worth, for whatever reason. And it's certainly true that you can't get everyone, without exception, on the same page. But that's really irrelevant. I think Steve and Roger are not advocating a uniform drumbeat to which everyone marches in lockstep, or attempting to prevent people from doing what they really want to do. The idea is to offer a constructive alternative to an unorganized field of underwater video content providers who don't know much about what each other are doing business-wise and being exploited by a very organized media industry based on optimizing their bottom line for their shareholders. It's not necessary to get everyone onboard to make a big difference -- the more people who are interested in working together to help influence the market, the more leverage they will have. And the more diverse ideas they will have about how to do this -- many heads are better than one.
I guess the only thing that we as individuals can do is have an understanding of what our materials are worth and try to sell at a figure better than or if not at least matching our expectations.
I'll agree that having an understanding of what our materials are worth is an important part of the puzzle. But how will that happen? Each individual can do the market research for him/herself and keep up with current trends, but even if that were a practical thing for one person to do it would represent a huge waste of time spent redundantly repeating the same research. Would a better picture of market value come from a cooperative network of people sharing what they learn? After all, isn't that what forums like this are all about -- people sharing info about topics to reduce the necessity of everyone spending effort on independently learning the same lessons from scratch?
I really think, and I think James touched on this earlier, that images of any genre, unless groundbreaking (Great White Shark Birth category etc) have all been seen before, there's no real value on the same Trout, Whaleshark, Nudibranch shot over and over again. It doesn't matter if its been shot, black and white, color, digital at 3MP, 6MP, 9MP or 35MP, the image is the image and its the market requirements for such imagery which will dictate the price of the shot / sequence.
That's one opinion of what the market is like, but I don't think it's the last word, or even a good overview. One has only to look at what professional photographs sell to see that the same flower or fish can be done in an infinite variety of ways that appeal to different interests. And as Roger pointed out, there is also a big difference between engaging video stories and gee-whiz-wow clips -- and a different market for each.
So if anyone here wants to continue to discuss possibilities of co-operative efforts to improve marketability of our work, I for one would like to hear from you. If your underwater video goal is mainly to spend excess money on equipment and vacations and to impress your friends, this topic will understandably be of less interest to you. But if you have a serious hankering to get a bigger audience for your work, to inform, to educate, and/or to have your video pay for itself, now's a good time to chime in.
If there WERE an underwater photo union (like above water shooters use) a lot of these problems would be solved automatically.
That's a nice thought, but unions, co-ops, and other forms of organized effort do require constant work by the people trying to make them useful. There a social form of entropy, that like it's physical counterpart, requires maintenance to prevent decay and collapse. And many of the people we would want to sell our work to aren't passionate do-gooder ocean advocates. Many of them are media suits who are representing their shareholders' interests and using their mighty resources to get the best deal they can. They can make it difficult for individuals, particularly ones who aren't already well networked in the industry, to determine the real nature of the market and to negotiate a good deal.
There's not chance that all underwater videographers will band together, there are too many different motivations, areas of interest, skill levels, etc. But if a significant number of like-minded souls can find enough common ground to work cooperatively to create some market leverage, I believe it could be to all their benefit.
