Archives: July, 2007
News
Mainstream Data announces acquisition of global content syndication company Newscom
Mainstream Data, a Salt Lake City, UT based content delivery and communications company, announced that it has acquired Newscom, LLC, from its prior owners (a 50/50 joint venture between Tribune Media Services, and The McClatchy Company). Newscom was founded in 1985 as a one-stop resource for content (stories and images) used by a wide variety of information companies. Newscom currently represents content from more than 115 partners , including the Agence France Press, the BBC, Deutsche Presse Agentur, Dorling Kindersley, Getty Images, Jupiterimages, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, Reuters and many others. In addition, Newscom has an offering of more than 19 million rights-managed and royalty-free photos, graphics, illustrations, news stories, and features, making Newscom one of the largest content collections in the world.
Editorials
Editorial: The real villain is oversupply, not micro-stock
Certain friends who attended CEPIC conference in Florence earlier this month tell me the issue of micro-stock put a cloud over the whole affair. Of course, those comments did not come from my friends among micro-stock company personnel, whose outlooks remain decidedly sunny. I wonder, though, whether the old guard can fairly blame micro-stock for the commercial stock photo industry’s troubled outlook. Naturally, the micro-stock model can only have a detrimental effect on the traditional business, over-all. But what if micro-stock never happened? Would the industry truly be much better off? I doubt it.
News
Mike Watson offers micro-stock and premium royalty free images on moodboard.com
Mike Watson, the founder and former CEO of DigitalVision, who recently launched a new RF production company called Mike Watson Images, has launched a new web-site where he will offer both low-priced micro-stock imagery as well as premium-priced RF. The web-site, called moodboard, will offer what it refers to as “quality” micro-stock imagery starting at US$15 for a low-res file and premium RF imagery starting at US$150.
Features
Visual case study: Ariel Sensitive laundry detergent
Procter & Gamble’s Ariel line of laundry detergents offer several varieties including Ariel Biological, Ariel Colour & Style, and Ariel Sensitive, each targeted at a specific segment of the market. Nearly everyone uses laundry detergent so the message is not focused on selling a need but rather on how the product identifies with your lifestyle. Ariel Sensitive is one of many specialized detergents for people with sensitive skin and allergies and rather logically the branding is focused on touch as part of what makes families close. The ads feature idealistic moments where the viewer is drawn in by their own need for family love and intimacy. Meg Asaro and Karen D’Silva from Spark Visual Research take a closer look at the images used by Ariel to reach customers in a crowded marketplace.
News
Associated Press now offering medicalpicture collection at apimages.com
In late 2006 The Associated Press launched a new stock photography platform located at APImages.com intended to be a centralized platform offering millions of images from a diverse group of contributors. Today the AP has announced a deal with the German photo library medical picture to represent more than 100,000 high quality photos, graphics, illustrations, 3D animations and videos from the Cologne picture agency. The images will be offered In the US as well as the Pacific region.
News
ArtSelect: from cubicle ennui to cubicle envy
ArtSelect, the A21 division that sells fine art to consumers and sister company to Superstock, hopes to expand the market for its product by offering it as a way to improve the view of cubicle-bound office workers. For many white-collar employees, the lowly cubicle epitomizes a dreary office existence and presents a small-space decorating problem. Now, in large part using imagery from Superstock, ArtSelect believes it has a solution that not only cheers up one's work space, but in so doing, also improves worker productivity.
News
Thought Equity to represent footage from NBC News archives
Thought Equity Motion has announced a deal to digitize and distribute selected footage content from the NBC News Archives. Thought Equity will make news clips and television programming from the last seventy years available for quick downloading for commercial and editorial use. The Denver, Colorado, company will also apply its technology to restore and preserve much of the older content in NBC’s vast collection.
News
age fotostock partners with IBL Bildbyrå
The Barcelona based stock photography company, age footstock has partnered with IBL Bildbyrå in Sweden, to represent age fotostock (rights managed) and Pixtal (royalty free). In addition, IBL Bildbyrå is now running its website on age fotostock´s proprietary THP (Technological Hosting Platform), thereby enabling http://www.ibl.se to integrate age fotostock´s search engine into their site and offer over 1,5 million rights managed and royalty free images.
News
Wellcome Images offering free medical stock photography under Creative Commons license
London based Wellcome Images, previously known as the Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library, is now offering its entire library under a Creative Commons license for Teachers, students, academics, and the general public. Wellcome Images claims to be the world's leading source of images on the history of medicine, modern biomedical science and clinical medicine. Under the terms of the Creative Commons License, users are allowed to copy, distribute and display the images, provided the source is fully attributed and it is used for non-commercial purposes.
News
Anistock, supplier of RF animation clips is launched
Anistock, a new supplier of 2d and 3d RF animation clips has launched with offices in Ireland and India. Brian O’Connell, a former VP of Sales at Stockbyte, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, owner of an animation studio in India, have joined forces to open the business. Anistock not only provides a wide selection of original RF animations, but also offers a quick-turn-around customization service allowing clients to embed their own company brand, audio, text or logo into any clip.
Features
A conversation with Kevin Schaff, CEO of Thought Equity Motion
Conditions seem especially ripe for the speedy ascendancy of moving imagery to a position of central importance in the content licensing business. Print media continues to suffer declining readership and ad-sales. Broadband access has reached ever growing numbers of households. Many say the new media and broadcast television will merge. To me, it looks more like the new media will, ultimately, lay claim to the broadcast industry and transform it into a small part of the amorphous whole we refer to as "the Internet." All of these conditions combine to create a growing market for moving imagery.
News
US Copyright Office begins beta testing for online registration
The US Copyright Office has for several years been undergoing an extensive business process reengineering initiative in order to streamline its registration process and begin offering an online registration system. All of the efforts are beginning to bear fruit as the copyright office has begun the Beta test phase of the electronic Copyright Office (‘‘eCO’’) in July 2007 with two separate test groups comprising a total of 112 applicants. Participants in the Beta test have been selected based upon a set of criteria designed to identify individuals with a wide variety of claims. The initial phase of the Beta test will cover basic registration claims for literary works, visual arts works, performing arts works and sound recordings submitted electronically. At a later date, additional participants will be added to cover all options for submitting applications.
News
William Radcliffe Appointed as new CTO at ScienceFaction
ScienceFaction announced today that digital media expert and former Corbis technology engineer William Radcliffe has joined the company as its Chief Technology Officer. Radcliffe spent twelve years at Corbis as an architect, research engineer, and strategist in the Emerging Technologies Group. He was also the first photographer to sign with ScienceFaction upon its founding in 2005.
Editorials
Editorial: Microstock in Context
While I think it’s fascinating that the Microstock phenomenon seems to dominate both industry-related blogs and external sources covering the world of stock photography these days (Hello Wired!), I think it makes sense to add to the discussion about Microstock’s potential long-term impact on the industry by offering the following points:
News
Britney Spears apologizes to X17
The Paparazzi and celebrities have long regarded each other as natural enemies. In a rare exception Britney Spears has apologized to the Paparazzi agency X17 with a letter in relation to an incident outside her residence in Hollywood, In February the actress had rushed after the car of a photographer wilding an umbrella shortly before the pop-princess checked into a hospital to Malibu. In the handwritten letter the singer explains her outburst was due to the mental preparation the actress was undertaking for a possible movie role. Naturally the website X17 published the letter promptly on the internet. The latter further explains the Britney Spears did not get the movie role she was seeking.
Features
Editorial: Virgin Mobile gets burned with Creative Commons photo from Flickr
It was bound to happen. The moment we old-timers in the stock photo industry have all been waiting for has finally arrived. A high profile client got burned by using down-market images that, it turns out, had no model releases. I and, I suspect, many colleagues got more than a little satisfaction out of the news.
News
Corbis is “in” at Conde Nast publication Women’s Wear Daily
Corbis continues to strengthen its celebrity and entertainment offerings with two new initiatives announced this week. First, the company has signed a deal with Condé Nast for the representation of fashion and celebrity images from the elite fashion industry trade magazine Women’s Wear Daily. Corbis will now make images from the world’s most exclusive fashion shows, parties and fashion industry events available for editorial use by the fast-growing entertainment media.
News
RR replaces RM on Getty’s new footage site
In keeping with their claim that licensing motion imagery represents a key area of future growth for the company, Getty has announced the launch of its new footage web-site. The e-commerce enabled site will license footage under either the Rights-Ready (RR) or the RF methods, only, and will not offer Rights-Managed licensing. In addition, Getty seeks not only to generate revenue by licensing the footage, but also by offering a service to help clients manage the digital assets they license from the company.
News
Cadmium launches microstock collection site
The UK provider of royalty-free stock photography and illustration, Cadmium, has teamed up with PantherMedia – a Munich-based photo agency, to launch a new microstock site called the Cadmium 120K+ collection. Created in response to customer demand for lower priced, royalty-free stock photography, the 120K+ collection offers over 120,000 royalty-free images for users working to a tight brief and budget.
News
NordicPhotos launches new royalty free collection Simply North
NordicPhotos, a leading Nordic stock agency, with offices in Reykjavik Iceland, and Stockholm Sweden, has launched a specialty Royalty Free collection called Simply North featuring a unique collection of lifestyle images with a Nordic style. The collection is available at nordicphotos.com and will be offered through 3rd-party distributors.
News
PACA goes to Vegas
The Picture Archive Council of America’s 2007 International Conference will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada, this year from Sunday evening, October 28th to Tuesday evening, October 30th. Keynote speaker, Michael Rogers will kick off the event with a presentation titled “How Media and Technology Affect Our Culture and Specifically Our Industry.” One of the nation's leading experts on the impact of technology on business and society, Rogers is Futurist-in-Residence for The New York Times Company, as well an interactive media pioneer, novelist and journalist. He also writes the popular "Practical Futurist" column for MSNBC.
