BENlabs

Corbis

Company type	Private
Industry	Digital image licensing and rights services www.corbis.com www.veer.com
Founded	Seattle, Washington, USA (1989)
Headquarters	Seattle, Washington, USA

Corbis Corporation is an American company, based in Seattle, Washington, that sells the rights to photographs, footage and other visual media. It has a collection of more than 100 million images and 500,000 video clips.

Lines of business

Image licensing and search

The company's collection includes contemporary creative, entertainment, and historical photography as well as art and illustrations. Among its acquisitions are the 11 million piece Bettmann Archive, acquired in 1995; the Sygma collection in France (1999); and the German stock image company Zefa (2005). Corbis also has the rights to digital reproduction for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London. Corbis adds hundreds of thousands of new images every year.

Corbis's collections include:

• Contemporary creative imagery from the zefa, etsa, Corbis's wholly owned collections and others.
• Celebrity photos from the Outline and Corbis Entertainment collections.
• Historical images from photojournalists, museums, and cultural institutions including Andy Warhol Foundation, Ansel Adams, Douglas Kirkland, James White, The Smithsonian Institution, The National Gallery, London, The State Hermitage Museum, Christie's Images, and the Bettmann, Hulton-Deutsch, Sygma and Brett Weston collections.

Corbis has a subsidiary, Veer, that focuses on licensing low-cost images that are crowd-sourced from photographers around the world as well as fonts and creative merchandise.

Rights services

Corbis has a division called GreenLight that handles licensing of content, clearances, rights representation and talent negotiations. GreenLight also represents rightsholders directly, including the personality rights of Bruce Lee; Johnny Cash and June Carter; the Andy Warhol Foundation; Steve McQueen; Mae West; the Wright brothers; and Albert Einstein. GreenLight's rights and music clearances group will secure third-party rights to celebrity talent, music, TV and film clips, trademarks, footage, etc.

Footage licensing

Corbis has a subsidiary, Corbis Motion, that has a library of more than 500,000 video clips including contemporary collections of people and lifestyle, business, sports, travel destinations, nature, and an archival collection that covers news and events, arts and entertainment and sports. The Corbis Motion web site has advanced search, purchase, and real-time delivery options.

History

Founding

Corbis is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems (a name currently held by an unrelated, slightly older company based in Concord, Massachusetts). One major reason for starting the company was Gates's belief that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork using digital frames.1 The company's name was changed to Continuum Productions in 1994 and to Corbis Corporation a year later. "Corbis" is Latin for "wicker basket", which at the time referred to the company's emerging view of itself as a receptacle or storehouse for visual media.

1990 to 2000

Corbis began with a goal much different from its strategy today. At its formation, Interactive Home Systems presented itself to the corporate world as an art-licensing company. Gates envisioned a system that could deliver the great art works of human history into consumers' homes, and he formed Interactive Home Systems as the company that eventually would beam the paintings of famous artists via technology that had yet to be developed. Interactive television was suggested as a way to deliver the content, but as the development of the ultimate conduit was under way, Corbis focused on digitizing content and acquiring rights to images. Corbis signed agreements with the likes of the National Gallery of London, the Library of Congress, the Sakamoto Archive, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Strategic Change in 1994 Leads to Bettmann Archive Acquisition in 1995

• In 1994, a new management team was put in place, as the pursuit of developing technology became a secondary concern. Of primary importance was cataloging, indexing, and acquiring further image collections. The change in priorities reflected a shift from the company's roots as an art-licensing concern toward a new corporate objective: assembling the most comprehensive digital photographic archive in the world. Along with the altered business focus came a new name. Interactive Home Systems was changed as the company's corporate banner, replaced by Continuum Productions, which was dropped in favor of Corbis Corporation, adopted in 1995.

• In October 1995, the company purchased the Bettmann Archive, which represented the life's work of Otto Bettmann, the son of a German-Jewish surgeon who began collecting discarded medical illustrations from his father's wastebasket at the age of 12. Prior to acquiring the Bettmann Archive, Corbis represented roughly 500,000 images, a total that increased exponentially when the Bettmann drawings, artworks, news photographs, and other illustrations were added to the company's portfolio. In all the Bettmann Archive contained 16 million images.citation The archive is today stored 220 feet underground in a refrigerated cave in the Iron Mountain storage facility,2 and the company also maintains a similar archive outside of Paris, France, preserving more than 30 million images from the Sygma Collection.

• In 1996 the company acquired the exclusive rights to approximately 40,000 images photographed by renowned wilderness photographer Ansel Adams. Citation

• In 1997, Corbis published several award winning CD-ROM titles such as A Passion for Art: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Dr. Barnes, compiled from the Barnes Foundation collection, and Leonardo DaVinci, which showcased the Codex Leicester. Citation

Corbis's image-licensing division benefited from significant acquisitions completed in 1998 that underscored the company's commitment to electronic commerce and ignited impressive revenue growth. In February, the company acquired Digital Stock Corp., a leading supplier of royalty-free images. Citation

• In 1998, another division was added to Corbis Images when the company acquired Outline Press Syndicate, Inc., the leading supplier of celebrity portrait photography. Renamed Corbis Outline, the company syndicated studio portraits and candid photographs of actors, musicians, athletes, politicians, business leaders, scientists, and other celebrities and provided the images for sale to a broad range of national magazines. Citation

• In June 1999, the company acquired Sygma, the largest news photography agency in the world. Organized as a division of Corbis Images, the France-based company, renamed Corbis Sygma, added an astounding 40 million additional images to the company's collection, expanding Corbis's portfolio beyond 65 million images. The archive is today stored in a preservation and access facility outside Paris. Citation

2000–2010

• Corbis business-to-business image licensing business expanded with the growth of the Internet in the early part of the decade. The company also expanded geographically, making multiple acquisitions such as the Stock Market Citation and expanding into the footage licensing market with the acquisition of Sekani.

• In 2005, the company expanded further into Europe with the acquisition of zefa citation, and into Australia in 2006, with the acquisition of Australian Picture Library Citation

• In July 2007, a new CEO, Gary Shank, was appointed. Citation. He oversaw aggressive cost-cutting efforts to improve the company’s financial performance and address the rise of low-cost competitors. The company experienced several waves of layoffs for the next several years, shed non-profitable lines of business and reduced its number of offices globally.

• In November 2007, Corbis announced that it would be purchasing Veer and would continue to operate it as a separate brand.

• In early June 2007, Corbis announced that it was creating a microstock website, SnapVillage. The company said it intended to use its microstock site as a farm club to find photographers who could also sell their photographs on the main Corbis Web site. In late June, the company launched SnapVillage, with about 10,000 images initially viewable. SnapVillage was closed due to low sales in early 2009 and rolled into Veer.

• Corbis rebranded its Rights Services Division as "GreenLight" in 2008. Citation

• In July 2008 Corbis sold eMotion LLC, its media management division, to Open Text Corporation.

• In May 2009, Corbis opened the Sygma Preservation and Access Facility outside Paris, France, housing tens of millions of photographic elements from the past half century in Europe. Citation. The company in 2009 also re-launched its Corbis Motion website with hundreds of thousands of new video clips, after signing a new partnership with Thought Equity Motion. Citation

• In 2010, Corbis increased its focus on serving web and mobile customers, with the introduction of low-resolution file sizes images that were more affordable for Web and Mobile use. Citation. Corbis also relaunched its Veer.com website with a greater focus on affordable images and fonts to compete more effectively against low cost competitors. Citation

• In 2010, Corbis was found to have committed fraud against Infoflows Corporation.

• Over this decade Corbis has made good strides in moving towards profitability and has made good progress - though it is believedTemplate:By Employees during interview to have still fallen short by tens of millions of dollars.

• In 2010, Corbis had the age discrimination law suit with Steve Lodis the SVP of HR. [1]

References

• Dear Bill Gates, Dir. Sarah J. Christman, USA, 2006.

External links

• Official website
• Veer
• Corbis Motion
• Green Light Rights
• Company history from Funding Universe