BBC Motion Gallery has expanded its stock library with archival footage from the Austrian Broadcasting Corp., Austria's largest public-service broadcaster.
Wave, a new royalty-free collection launched by Canadian stock agency First Light, addresses the environment and its impact. Wave focuses on imagery showing positive practices, lifestyles, responsible recreation, sustainable energy production, organic agriculture and protected habitats. The collection includes both still and footage stock.
California-based PixelMill has added 4,500 royalty-free music tracks from Jupiterimages to its online inventory. This extends an existing agreement between the two companies.
In light of Getty Images' latest moves, I predict that very soon (certainly in less than a year) virtually every company producing RF images will try to sell their images through as many microstock portals as possible, as well as traditional portals.
New York-based Fotolia says it is the largest microstock agency, with nearly 2.3 million images in inventory. Fotolia attributes this growth to the high contributor commissions, which it says averages 50% of the sale price.
Corbis has announced that it has opened a gallery in the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, the online game that has grown to more than 9 million residents since its birth in 2003. For now, the goal is to turn the gallery into a social gathering spot and a cultural landmark.
Citizen Image, the New York-based citizen photojournalism agency, has launched an assignment service. In beta since the beginning of 2007, the online assignment board provides buyers with "specific images of breaking news events from camera-equipped bystanders, as well as specific stock images for commercial purposes."
Getty Images will use Punchstock.com to launch a new RF brand called Valueline on August 31. Prices for Valueline images will be $19 for a 1mb low res image and $49 for all other RF file sizes from 10mb to 300mb.
After several weeks of running a beta version of the redesigned gettyimages.com alongside the old site, the company has switched to the new interface.
Getty Image has announced a new Web-use price of $49 for a 500k 72DPI file of any of its images, regardless of brand or pricing model. This fee entitles the purchaser rights to use any selected RM image on any commercial or editorial Web site, email, mobile devices or multimedia project for one year.
Though recent revenue reports of leading stock-licensing companies have disappointed investors, Jupiterimages CEO Alan Meckler says his company's rights-managed business is on the rise. Meckler credits Getty Images' refusal to distribute Jupiterimages stills several years ago as largely responsible for the current upward trend.
In the last 10 years, price and demands have changed in the text and trade book industry. At present, there are pricing requests for circulations of up to 1.5 million, and it is not uncommon to get pricing requests for 500,000 to a million circs. Prices, like circs, have changed, too.
To celebrate its five-year milestone, Turbo Photo plans to make over 1,000 Web-resolution images available free of charge for the month of September. New subscribers get a choice of 50 free images as a signing bonus.
Corbis has partnered with Moving Pictures Magazine to produce and license celebrity images, interviews and video from the Toronto International Film Festival.
While copyright infringement lawsuits are an ever-present part of the photography business, much recent litigation has been directed at search engines. Content owners, including Viacom, Universal and Perfect 10, are alleging that a number of Web 2.0 companies have committed various offenses, ranging from direct infringement to facilitating content misappropriation by others. Now industry groups are actively weighing in.
PicScout, which has offices in San Francisco and Herzeliya, Israel, has expanded its copyright-monitoring service to include Australia. The Israeli company services the Big Three stock agencies and smaller, specialty agencies alike.
Getty Images has launched a business-to-business affiliate program, which will allow Web site owners to earn commissions by pointing traffic to gettyimages.com. The company hired LinkConnector, an affiliate-marketing company based in Cary, N.C., to manage the program.
Yahoo! has announced that it will close its photo-sharing site Yahoo! Photos on Sept. 20. The company decided to focus all its efforts on Flickr, though users can transfer their images to various sites.