Shutterstock has announced that it is expanding its editorial and music services businesses with the acquisition of two companies --
Rex Features and
PremiumBeat.
With offices in London and Los Angeles, Rex Features has been in the photography business for over 60 years. The company has an international reputation as a premier source of celebrity, entertainment, sports and news images as well as a strong video collection and is considered one of the world's leading independent photographic press agencies and picture libraries.
Currently, the Rex collection has about 13 million digitized images and 10 million prints that may be digitized sometime in the future. About 10% of these images have been produced by staff photographers and are wholly owned. Thee rest were produced by freelance photographers who receive a royalty whenever one of their images is used. All of the images have been, and will continue to be, licensed as rights managed.
It is anticipated that some of the wholly owned images may be integrated into the Shutterstock collection. Currently, Shutterstock has 808,565 celebrity images in its collection and it seems possible that some of these images may be integrated into the Rex offering.
Images belonging to the freelance photographers submitting to Rex will not be integrated into the Shutterstock offering without the specific permission of each contributor. As a separate division of Shutterstock the Rex Features site will continue to operate as it has in the past.
One of Shutterstock’s principle reasons for the acquisition was to expand its operations on the editorial side of the photo business and to take advantage of Rex’s expertise and customer contacts in this segment of the market. Rex serves thousands of customers, including many of the world’s leading magazines, websites, newspapers, agencies, and broadcasters.
“The acquisition of Rex Features marks our substantive entry into editorial imagery — a new market for Shutterstock with significant potential and many opportunities to better serve global media companies,” said Jon Oringer, Shutterstock founder and CEO.
PremiumBeat
PremiumBeat is a leading provider of exclusive, high-quality music and sound effects for use in videos, films, television, apps, games, and other creative projects. Music from PremiumBeat has been used by top companies like Apple, BMW, H2O Wireless, and Molson Canadian. It was also featured in the trailer for Mongrel Media’s
Watermark.
Earlier this year Shutterstock set out to make licensable music accessible to any business with the launch of
Shutterstock Music; the acquisition of PremiumBeat will help to accelerate this mission.
“We are excited to add such a complementary business in PremiumBeat, with a fast-growing customer base and an extraordinary collection,” said Jon Oringer, founder and CEO of Shutterstock. “We understand the intersection between music and video and believe that music licensing will benefit from the same, strong market demand we are capitalizing on with video.”