ATI News Round-Up: (recent news, events, announcements, exhibits, etc..)
• OnRequest Images, a Seattle-based company that builds custom stock photo libraries for corporations has raised $8MM from a European investment group to be used for expansion of the business in Europe.
• Corbis hires Barry Allen as the company’s new Chief Financial Officer.
• Corbis and Getty announce new footage initiatives. Corbis adds extensive High Definition (HD) footage from Serac Adventure Films, an award-winning production company specializing in high-quality expedition films. Getty becomes the exclusive distributor of high-definition footage from American Public Television series “Art Wolfe’s Travels to the Edge.”
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The stock photo agency Corbis has come up with a unique and fun promotion on their site offering colorful Do-It-Yourself (DIY) pinhole cameras decorated with the company’s photos and illustrations. Pinhole cameras are more fun than practical but they do allow the photographer to create gloriously lo-tech images with a nostalgic feel. The cameras were designed by the Fwis design firm in NYC exclusively for Corbis.
The marketing executives at the Corbis-owned micro-stock business, SnapVillage, have come up with a promotional scheme that is bound to attract interest among their target market and provide a few good laughs in the bargain. Encouraging designers to “forget that pesky ‘client approval’ thing for a change,” the company has announced a fake ad contest. Anyone who wants to participate can simply create their own ad for a fictional client using a free or watermarked image from SnapVillage.
PicScout, a technology company with offices in San Francisco and Herzelia Israel best known for helping stock licensing companies monitor distribution of their content, has launched a new service called PicApp for bloggers and other online publishers to use copyrighted images for free on their websites. Rather than pay for the content with traditional licensing fees each image is accompanied by an advertisement that generates royalties to the content contributor.
Corbis has made a new marketing push to promote its answer to the micro-stock phenomenon, SnapVillage, which the company launched late in the second quarter of 2007. Corbis says it will now start to “aggressively target customers, including introducing its first advertisements, launching direct marketing activities and expanding its search engine marketing.” As a relative late-comer to the micro-stock business, SnapVillage will now compete in earnest with the Getty’s iStockphoto, Jupiter’s Stockxpert, and several well-known independent businesses in the micro-stock space including Dreamstime, Fotolia and LuckyOliver.
Beate Chelette, the founder of the Beateworks, a boutique agency that specialized in architecture, interior design and celebrity homes, will leave the post she has held since Corbis bought her company in March, 2006. After the sale to Corbis, the company appointed Chelette to the position of Senior Director of Photography, Entertainment. Edie Tobias, a veteran of the stock photo industry who most recently worked for Jupiter Images, will take over for Chelette effective immediately.
Looking back at 2007 in the stock photo industry, several interesting stories come to the fore. The year started with a bang when news leaked about a possible acquisition of Jupiter by Getty. That deal never happened, but several other high-profile acquisitions did take place last year, from Getty’s acquisitions of WireImage, Punchstock and Pump Audio to the purchase of Veer by Corbis. Jupiter took a break from the stock photo business buying spree of previous years but remained busy developing its events and on-line media segments which included the launch of several new trade shows and the acquisition of MediaBistro.
Corbis has announced a a partnership with SendMe Mobile, a leading entertainment platform for mobile phone users, to deliver red carpet and celebrity images to mobile phones consumers. This agreement marks a big step by Corbis to bring commercial entertainment imagery to the consumer market. In addition, the entire Corbis mobile library will also be available through SendMeMobile.com with a wide range of premium photos.
