The F Stops Here

NEW YORK, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ — ImageSpan Inc., the creator of LicenseStream, the market-leading licensing and royalty payment automation platform for all media, today announced that several owners of premier collections and libraries of images, including the Missouri History Museum and “Visions of America: Photographing Democracy” author and photographer Joseph Sohm are opening their content for business using ImageSpan’s new LicenseStream Business Edition. The announcement was made at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo, the large photography industry trade show at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York.

Built on the LicenseStream platform, LicenseStream Business Edition gives owners of premier collections and libraries of images, video and audio a quick-start, all-inclusive, Web-based service that allows content owners to showcase, license, track and monetize the full value of their content through their own branded online stores.

“With LicenseStream Business Edition, content owners can publish their content directly to their own online store or anywhere else on the Web and to global search engines, enabling anyone in the world to find their search-optimized content and pay for it with a mouse click,” said Iain Scholnick, chief executive officer, ImageSpan. “This essentially makes the content itself the storefront. It dramatically speeds the pace of transactions and drives incremental revenues. Until now, media companies, libraries and owners of premier collections had a tough time justifying the cost of putting the head as well as the long tail of their content on the Web because the revenues they realized could not cover the costs associated out-dated manual licensing transactions. Now content owners of all sizes can make their entire catalog of media – not just the hits – available online to maximize their assets’ value.”

Missouri History Museum already has made available online via LicenseStream Business Edition more than 3,000 images, including a wide range of Civil War-era images, a wide range of early daguerreotypes and other photos and images related to American Indian people and culture, and images of oil paintings and artifacts related to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who headed up the first overland expedition by the United States to the Pacific Coast and back.

“We often receive requests from visitors asking us about the art and artifacts we display and how they can get copies,” said Dr. Robert R. Archibald, president, the Missouri History Museum. “With LicenseStream Business Edition, we can now publish images of our collections directly to the Web so that anyone in the world can find our search-optimized images and pay for them with a mouse click. LicenseStream also has dramatically cut the time spent by our staff on searching for and processing such image requests so we can respond to requests in a day versus months, accelerating both of transactions and revenues while cutting costs.” (Please see related release: Missouri History Museum Selects ImageSpan’s LicenseStream to Maximize the Value of Its Photos, Prints)

American history teacher turned Producer-Photographer-Writer Joseph Sohm is now using LicenseStream Business Edition to license the more than 1,300 photographs included in his “Visions of America: Photographing Democracy,” ($60; November 2009; Visions of America LLC/Midpoint Trade Books Dist.) a book that offers a sweeping portrait of life in the American democracy via an epic photographic journey across the United States. For more than 25 years, Sohm traveled and photographed all 50-states. Images from his “Visions of America” collection have been published 50,000 times in his lifetime.

“LicenseStream Business Edition enables me to publish my work directly to my own branded storefront as well as to the Web and major search engines in a way that also lets potential buyers license it on the spot,” said Sohm, whose “Visions of America” recently won the Gold medal for “Best Coffee Table Book” at the 13th annual Independent Publishing awards in New York City. While requiring minimal investment, LicenseStream also allows content owners to retain a larger share of royalties for each transaction – multiple times the 20 percent royalty fee offered by most major agencies. “That key difference makes it affordable for me to shoot, metatag, process and offer my customers a much greater selection of photographs online.”

LicenseStream Business Edition pricing starts at $5,500 annually with a 25% transaction fee. The annual fee can be billed one-time, monthly or quarterly to suit a client’s needs.

ImageSpan’s Vice President, Enterprise Business Development Candice Murray will speak on “Tools for Selling Stock Direct” at 1:15 p.m. Thursday, October 22, at the PDN PhotoPlus Conference in New York.

ImageSpan also will be demonstrating LicenseStream Business Edition and its other LicenseStream services in Booths #1155 at the concurrent PhotoPlus Expo in New York, October 22-24. Come see Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice talk about LicenseStream’s benefits in the ImageSpan booth at 11 a.m. Friday, October 23rd.

© 2009, The F Stops Here. All rights reserved. (Jessica D. Korman)