NBC Opens Division to Get the Bigger Picture

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NBC Universal Inc. has gone into image control mode.


Starting this month, the studio will open a new digital media distribution group to market photos from an archive with an estimated 12 million images.


Kevin Fitzgerald, who co-founded the digital image firm ImageDirect before selling it to Getty Images in 2003, will manage the new operation based at NBC’s Burbank studios.


The strategic motive for the group comes from what Fitzgerald calls “an insatiable and ever-growing demand for celebrity imagery.” However, the group’s mission starts with the digitization and preservation of the NBC images and ends with the eventual generation of revenue.


“We live in a world that has become increasingly image driven,” said Bruce Brosnan, general manager of Variety Images, a new office at the showbiz publication formed to build an image archive rather than rely on free publicity shots. “Think about how many Web sites there are, and how many uses they have for images. The still image demand is rising, and I don’t see the market contracting for the next 10 years.”


Fitzgerald’s group will handle NBC-related images dating back to radio days of the 1940s, but not movie materials from Universal Studios. Also, the group won’t handle publicity images for current or future shows, which the studio will continue to distribute free to the media.


Previously, the Globe Photos agency distributed NBC’s historical photos. But the new digital group plans to encourage more use of old pictures around the network. “We hope to better promote the brand through the usage and marketing of these images, which you wouldn’t expect from a third-party vendor,” Fitzgerald explained.


On the control front, the group will have people dedicated to limiting the pirated use of images again, a service not normally handled by outsiders.


To access images, users will register at a special Web site where they can search the existing database. If the search comes up dry, the user can call NBC and request a low-tech hunt among stacks of prints and transparencies. If the image turns up, NBC will send the user an e-mail granting access to a Web site capable of high-resolution downloads. Billing will go through a snail-mail invoice.


Subjects in the collection range from Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to “Friends.”


Brosnan notes that the monetary value of an image can fluctuate wildly. A recent photo of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt fetched $4 million, but he estimates that within a few months, its value could fall to a few hundred dollars. “Few investments depreciate that quickly. It shows the importance of capitalizing and distributing that image in a timely manner,” he said.


Fitzgerald said that other entertainment conglomerates have enormous image warehouses, but NBC is the first to invest the necessary resources to mine the value of its asset. “It will be interesting to see how the others react,” he said.

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