The launch of Windows 10 later this year could dramatically change the way people find pictures. On April 29th during the annual Microstock Build Developers Conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella described how Microsoft intends to (1) Build the Intelligent Cloud, (2) Reinvent productivity and business process and (3) Create more personal computing.
Shutterstock has reported $97.5 million in revenue for Q1 2015, a 34% increase over Q1 2015. There were 33.4 downloads for the quarter. About 28% percent of revenue for the quarter was paid out to contributors in royalties. The average price per download was $2.87 up from $2.68 in the previous quarter and a 17% increase compared to Q1 2015. There were 51.6 million images in the collection as of March 31, 2015 plus 2.6 million video clips. At the end of the quarter the company had 542 employees worldwide.?
In March,
Shutterstock began testing a new collection called
Premier Selects that is only available to Enterprise customers. For more about how it works check out
https://premier.shutterstock.com.
Maria Pallante the current Register of Copyrights and Director of the United States Copyright Office testified before the House Judiciary Committee on April 29th and offered a number of ideas for modernization of the copyright office. You can access the entire testimony
here.
Dreamstime has announced the release of
Stock Photos by Dreamstime, a new mobile phone app geared toward customers interested in purchasing and downloading images directly onto their smartphones and tablets. With the new mobile app, the Dreamstime team will be able to offer its popular, high quality digital images to an even greater range of on-the-go customers.
Shutterstock has provided a list of the 10 most popular cameras used by their contributors in 2014. (See
Chart.) They obtained this information by extracting the EXIF data from the photos uploaded.
Pond5, has unveiled auto-tagging technology that they claim is the first of its kind in the stock media industry. Built with artificial intelligence, this pioneering feature automatically generates keywords for each photo and video uploaded to the Pond5 platform.
The U.S. Copyright Office has created a
Fair Use Index to assist creators and user in understanding what is considered “Fair Use.” Fair use is a longstanding and vital aspect of American copyright law. The goal of the Index is to make the principles and application of fair use more accessible and understandable by presenting a searchable database of court opinions.
Want to know more about the people who are producing images that are licensed at microstock and subscription prices?
Shutterstock Panorama is worth a look.
Recently, I was asked to comment on whether a photographer under exclusive contract with a stock agency that licensed the work as Rights Managed could simultaneously post the same images on one of a series of social media sites.