[Foundation-l] 1.6 Billion USD to spare? How about liberation of some pictures

[geni]

On 23/01/2008, Ben McIlwain <cydeweys at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Mathias Schindler wrote:
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/business/media/21deal.html?ref=business
> >
> > Getty Images, the world's biggest supplier of pictures and video to
> > media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block
> > and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the
> > situation said Sunday.
>
> It's no wonder they're trying to sell now, when they think they can
> still get $1.5 billion.  They see the writing on the wall; the
> simultaneous advancements in pro-sumer level digital cameras and growth
> of free content repositories like Flickr* and Wikimedia Commons have
> decimated their once lucrative business.  And it's only going to go
> downhill for them from here.
>
> *Of course, most of Flickr's content does not qualify as free content,
> but even the small percentage that does makes up many millions of
> photographs, more than enough to threaten Getty's business model.
>

Slight complication is that Getty own a lot of historical images that
are not really replaceable either because they are iconic or because
they are about the only pictures of the event in question.

-- 
geni