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Articles from June 2012
ABC News VideoSource has upgraded and expanded its website to provide greater and easier access to ABC News’ vast archival footage online. Producers and researchers will now be able to browse, license and, in some cases, immediately access tens of thousands of video assets from ABC News’ expansive archives with the click of a mouse. It offers customers, including documentary filmmakers, educators or anyone with an interest in archival video footage, historically-rich news video from a vast collection spanning from 1896 to the present.
Following its acquisition of
Specialist Stock and its move into the footage side of the stock image business
Robert Harding World Imagery has created its Comprehensive Research Facility (CRF) which not only offers research of its own collections but will also research a range of satellite suppliers including BBC Motion Gallery, NHNZ, Footage Search and SKYWORKS amongst others.
Alamy has published an 11-page
white paper that examines the challenges current pricing and licensing models face. The paper summarizes a round table discussion where key industry decision makers, including picture buyers, photographers, journalists, commentators and stock image providers, examined the issue.
T3Media, Inc. (formerly Thought Equity Motion), a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services, has announced the launch of a new licensing offering—
Paya ™ (Pay-ya), the world's index of licensable content™. To watch a short video that explains how Paya works, click
here.
Universal Images Group (UIG), owned by industry veteran George Sinclair (also the founder of the Virtual Picture Desk in 2002 and co-author of Britannica’s Image Quest), has acquired the business rights and digital library of the
MyLoupe and the
Ad Stock Images picture agencies.
In November 2010 the UK government called for an independent review of
the Intellectual Property laws and practices and assigned Professor Ian
Hargreaves and a panel of experts to prepare a report. The report,
submitted in May 2011, made 10 recommendations designed to ensure that
the UK has an IP framework “best suited to supporting innovation and
promoting economic growth in the digital age.” I'd like to recommend a different approach.
Since 2005 MediaStorm has produced 30 powerful,
issue-driven video stories about real life people and problems. All this work has been available for free on their
website. Most of these stories have been viewed a million or more times and they tend to draw large audiences outside the photo industry.
In the near future photographers can expect to see are some dramatic
changes in the way subscriptions are defined. Until now, most
subscriptions have allowed customers to download 25 images per day for
the duration of the subscription ranging from 1
month to 1 year. Now a number of new options are being introduced.
Stock photographers regularly complain about the “Race To The Bottom” in
terms of pricing and they look for someone to blame. Favorite whipping
boys are Getty Images, Alamy and microstock. But, these distributors are
not really the problem. The problem is technology.
Anyone thinking about setting up their own fully functional search engine to license images should read
Yuri Arcurs article about the trials and tribulations he went through in creating
PeopleImages.com.
Universal Images Group (UIG) has now opened an office in New York. This
is in addition to its offices in Chicago, USA; Rome, Italy and
Chelmsford in the UK. The business has achieved triple digit revenue
growth through distribution and electronic publishing in the past year
and it has become essential to provide a further production &
editing center in USA.
Every few months I put together a summary of some of our most important
recently published stories. This selection is designed to help investors
who are trying to understand the industry as well as image creators
just beginning to explore the idea of licensing their images. Regular
readers will have seen these stories. Please refer friends interested in
licensing images to this series of articles.
Evolve Images (
www.evolveimages.com) has announced that Lewis Blackwell has joined the company as Chief Creative Officer. Blackwell brings to Evolve an impressive array of credentials with leading experience in the image creation and licensing industry, as well as deep knowledge and active membership of the image-buying community.
Stephen Walker recently read a report about
Shutterstock’s IPO plans on APhotoEditor. He then posted the on following conclusions on the ASMPstock group on yahoo. "Traditional RM, RF are growing at a pretty good clip? Micro more so!" He also said, "I see these numbers as a strong indicator of growth and positive for stock shooters." I think he is entirely wrong. Read why.
Searching for a buyer for Getty Images or deciding whether to launch an
IPO may be the least of CEO Jonathan Klein’s worries these days. He’s
got to be looking at Shutterstock and Fotolia and anticipating that they
will use a good part of their new found wealth to build their premium
collections. When that happens, will these brands cut further into the
Getty Images franchise?
U.S. Judge Denny Chin has issued an opinion denying Google's motion to
dismiss lawsuits by the American Society of Media Photographers and the
Authors Guild. The motion to dismiss had been based primarily on
Google's assertion that trade associations did not have
standing to bring a copyright infringement suit on behalf of members. In
his ruling, the Judge asserted that "given the sweeping and
undiscriminating nature of Google's unauthorized copying, it would be
unjust to require that each affected association member litigate his
claim individually."
Most online databases of stock photos contain hundreds of thousands of
images that are never seen by potential buyers. This can be attributed
to the fact that the sole way of finding images is through the use of
keywords. Learn more about how Visual Search could go a long way to solving this problem and the specific strategy used by
Pixolution.
Late last week
Shutterstock sent out a press release introducing – a little pre-maturely it turns out – a new image discovery tool called “Shutterstock Instant.” In fact, if you go to the Shutterstock site there is no evidence that this feature exists. It turns out it is still a prototype. As with all prototypes when it is finally released to the public it may be quite a bit different than it is today.
It no longer makes sense to keep microstock and traditional stock separate. It’s time to look at integration. Read this article to understand why and what the industry needs to do to go about accomplishing such an integration.
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This stock photography news site focuses on the business side of photography with a special emphasis on stock photography. Our goal is to help photographers maximize their earnings based on the quality of their work and the commitment they are prepared to make to the trade. The information provided will be applicable to part-timers as well as full time professional photographers. We’ll leave it to others to teach photographers how to take better pictures.
Jim Pickerell launched his career as a photographer in 1963. In 1990 he began publishing a regular newsletter on stock photography. In 1995 the information was made available online as well as in print and was gradually expanded to a daily service.
Click here for Pickerell's full biography.
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