Alamy is the latest stock picture agency to branch out beyond stills by moving into motion image sales.

Launching with more than 100,000 clips, the Oxfordshire-based company says it aims to expand its motion collection rapidly over the next year, developing "an encyclopaedic collection of video the way it has with stills [30 million images and counting]", aimed at advertisers, online publishers and the education market.

Sourced from agencies such as Wavebreak, Corbis, Blend, Image Source, Specialist Stock, DV Archive and Rubberball, the imagery will be sold using a one-price structure, which it says is "a hybrid of the best features of rights-managed and royalty-free" licensing, designed to take the complexity out of buying video stock.

"The demand for video has seen a tremendous increase in recent years... driven by the need for rich media content for online and integrated marketing campaigns, e-books, websites, blogs..." says Alan Capel, head of content at Alamy. "Responding to society's need for visual input, video is now an integral part of our lives.... We now live and learn in a world full of visual, animated and aural inputs. And the old world order of printed text on a page is no longer the best way to captivate media consumers. We are now engaging the iPad generation with a medium they embrace. Video can make information fun, stimulating and memorable in a way that text often cannot."

The new collection went on sale today in the UK, and will be "rolling out to the US and all remaining territories in the coming weeks".