Do you think Flickr , Bubbleshare , YouTube and the rest of the photo and video sharing sites are irrelevant?
Think again!
Let’s look at image leader Getty Images:
Getty Images, Inc. (Getty Images) is a creator and distributor of visual content. The Company provides relevant imagery and related services to creative professionals at advertising agencies, graphic design firms, corporations, and film and broadcasting companies; editorial customers involved in newspaper, magazine, book, compact disc (CD) and online publishing, and corporate marketing departments and other business customers. Getty Images offers its imagery and related services through the Company’s Website and a global network of Company-owned offices and delegates. The Company offers its customers a variety of visual content, including creative or stock imagery (both still and moving images), editorial photography (news, sports, entertainment and archival imagery), illustrations and related services.
This year it has had about 40 percent of it’s market capitalization disintegrate. That is $2 plus billion for you home gamers.
I would say Getty is the company least happy with Web 2.0 at the moment. More Getty’s to come.
Agreed. This past week one of my Mardi Gras pictures ended up in the Seattle Times, via flickr. The people putting together the article offered me a stock photo fee, “we’ll pay you what we usually pay getty images.”
My response? You’d like to pay me for one of the pictures the alcohol was kind enough to give me? Sure!
Amazing stuff. Thanks
If distribution is the only qualifying factor, why isn’t feature film makers like Sony and Universal threatened by home videos? I guess a bunch of monkeys could write Shakespeare, but so far they haven’t.
Good question-
distribution is the first key factor and bandwith makes it possible. 99 percent of the content is crappola and will stay that way for some time.
They are not threatened because the internet is not the medium for general feature film production. It is deep, topical, short show like rocketboom that are the first wave.
The talent will be signed by the studios if they can as the crossover accelerates and internet stars maybe become movie stars.
Brilliant post and great comments.
High-end feature films won’t suffer for some time, but, for a number of reasons, low budget feature films are going to be shaken up in the coming years.
It’s not all about distribution though – it’s the intersection of many different factors.
If you think of independently produced video content that is appearing online in terms of standard product commercialization stages, we’re in the very early innings with lots of change, challenges and opportunities ahead.
Thanks Fraser
its early for sure