During this week’s PhotoPlus Expo, Sausalito-based ImageSpan announced that its flagship product LicenseStream is now available in a business edition. This allows content owners to license and track their content through branded online stores.
LicenseStream is a licensing and payment automation platform that facilitates direct transactions between image owners and buyers. Available for a fee plus percentage of sales, the platform allows users to embed ownerships, rights and restriction information into images displayed online. It facilitates use-based pricing and offers transactional support ranging from e-commerce to tracking usage. Previously existing LicenseStream Creator and LicenseStream Enterprise have now been joined by LicenseStream Business Edition, priced starting at $5,500 plus a 25% transaction fee.
The Missouri History Museum and Visions of America: Photographing Democracy author and photographer Joseph Sohm have signed on to use and publicly endorsed the new product.
The Missouri History Museum used it to make over 3,000 images available online. President Robert Archibald said: “Anyone, anywhere in the world may find these search-optimized images and license them immediately with a mouse click instead of waiting up to six weeks as occurred with previous manual processes. LicenseStream also enables us to cut dramatically time spent on internal searches for images, on processing forms and on tracking financials, so we can accelerate the pace of transactions with our image customers to drive incremental revenues.”
Sohm is using the ImageSpan platform to market photography from his recent book. For him, the motivator is that he sees the upfront investment in LicenseStream as minimal and appreciates retaining a larger share of royalties than the 20% typical for major agencies. “That key difference makes it affordable for me to shoot, metatag, process and offer my customers a much greater selection of photographs online,” Sohm explains.