Thursday, April 19, 2007

Groundbreaking Study estimates size of Stock Footage Industry at $282 million

(source: StockPhotoTalk.com ) ACSIL Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies 2007 provides an inside look at footage industry

New York, NY, April 2, 2007. The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) has completed the ACSIL Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies 2007, a comprehensive and detailed examination of the issues and challenges faced by leaders in the footage-licensing field.

Coming in at 259 pages, the report covers a broad spectrum of critical topics including:

  • the state of digitization;
  • the nature of current license agreements and rights packages;
  • the emergence of new markets and customer types;
  • changes in order volume; and
  • current approaches to marketing and new business development.

In addition to survey data collected from 67 key footage companies, the Global Survey includes an analysis and index of the global stock footage industry by estimated revenues, content type, web-functionality and region.

"This report allows individual companies to understand their own performance within the context of the broader industry," said ACSIL Co-President David Sheehan. "And to have so many participants share information is one of the many delightful outcomes of commissioning this study."

The Global Survey takes a bottom-up approach to estimating the dollar size of the total footage industry, focusing specifically on a group of 355 active, commercial footage companies/departments identified as part of the study. The estimate of total industry annual revenue ($282 million) is built from the sum of the individual revenue estimates applied to each company.

"There is so much information in the report and the synthesis is really a joy to read," said Peter McKelvy, Vice President of Footage and Music Services, Discovery Communications Inc. "For me, educating an executive team in a large company about the footage sales business, this report will be invaluable."

The industry was also analyzed based on a variety of other aspects including geographic distribution. For example, 48% of the companies analyzed in the Global Survey are based in the United States, accounting for $170 million in gross revenue or 60% of the global market. 24% are based in the UK, accounting for $63 million.

Please visit www.thrivingarchives.com for more information on obtaining a copy of the report.

About ACSIL

Founded as a non-profit trade association in early 2003 by a group of leading stock footage companies and news agencies in the United States, ACSIL is focused solely on the commercial interests of the stock footage industry, and meeting the demand for market data on this industry is central to ACSIL's mission.

About Thriving Archives

Thriving Archives is a market research and business development consultancy focused on addressing the unique challenges faced by stock footage companies.

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Publishing site Lulu partners with Getty Images

Published: April 19, 2007, 7:02 AM PDT
Lulu.com, a site that lets members publish, print and sell their own books, has entered into a multiyear agreement with stock-photo giant Getty Images.

In this deal, Getty will provide its royalty-free--but still copyright-protected--image database to Lulu so that its members can use the contents in their self-published books, photo books and calendars. Lulu has emphasized the copyright-friendly nature of the agreement, explaining in a release that the high-resolution version of a Getty image is not "married" to a Lulu book until right before production. This way, according to Lulu, digital rights management restrictions on the stock images are honored.

Partnering with a company that specializes in copyrighted images is somewhat unusual for a company like Lulu, whose roots are definitively open source. The self-publishing site was founded by Robert Young, who co-founded Red Hat Linux along with Marc Ewing in 1994.

In addition to offering self-publishing on demand to members, Lulu has also sold titles from the Internet Archive's Open Library, considered by some to be an open-source equivalent to Google's controversial Library Project.

ulu touts 200,000 recently published titles with more than 5,000 additions each week. In addition to selling self-published books, the site also offers e-books, CDs, DVDs, and music and software downloads, with editorial and copyright control in the hands of the individual publisher. There's no fee to publish on Lulu, but the site does take a commission from each sale.

The Getty database will be available to Lulu members beginning this summer.

FlickrCash similarly offers FREE, LICENSED images from Flickr TODAY http://flickrcash.com

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VA Tech shootings: world perspective

News veteran and media sage Dan Gillmor has a thoughtful op-ed online today about online, "conversational media" response to the Virginia Tech shootings, and what's different this time. Snip:
I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases. It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this: In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

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Academy Award-winning film released under Creative Commons

A reader writes, In 1997, a Dewey-Obenchain film crew accompanied an Interplast volunteer surgical team to An Giang province in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The filmmakers donated their services to document the team's experiences and produce "A Story of Healing," which earned the 1997 Academy Award for best documentary, short subject. The 28-minute film is followed by a short epilogue (after the credits) which follows-up on two patients 16 months after their surgeries.

Ten years later, Interplast is proud to announce that "A Story of Healing," has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivatives license (by-nc-nd) and is available for free online.

It should be a no-brainer, especially for mission-driven non-profits, but this is the first time that an Academy Award winning film has been licensed under any Creative Commons license.

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Moo launches notecards

Moo, the killer printers who make custom, kid-sized business-cards from your Flickr stream, Second Life, or Habbo stuff, have just launched a new product: note cards.

Moo Note Cards are little note-sized cardboard sheets, with envelopes, that are printed with your Flickr pix. Just like with Moo Cards, you can pick a different image for every card. I ran out of business cards a couple months ago and switched to my Moo Cards and I've never gotten so many compliments. The print quality is superb, and I love that each one has a little story for the picture I took for it.

Well, to put it bluntly, we miss mail. Not email - we get that by the bucketload - but real post. Post that isn’t a utility bill or something boring. So we dreamed up NoteCards - square prints made from up to 16 of your own photos or designs. They have a magic folding-flap down one side, to make them stand up proudly on your bookshelf or windowsill, and they’re the perfect size to mail to friends...

You can personalise the back of your cards in two different ways. There’s 6 lines of larger text for a main message, and at the bottom of the cards, there’s 4 lines of small text, for things like a photographers credit, the name of the photo, or your website url.

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