MocoInterview: Brooks McMahon, VP Getty Images On Mobile Efforts

Getty Images is one of those media companies that is both threatened by and is offered a lot of opportunities by new media, especially mobile phones in the case of Getty. While camera-phones are often heralded as the death of syndicated image companies (although there is always going to be a market for professional images) the mobile screen is offering yet another place for Getty’s product to be shown, which results in more license revenue. Getty tackled the citizen journalism part of the equation by buying Scoopt a couple of weeks ago, and I spoke to Brooks McMahon, VP of new products and platforms about the companies plans for the mobile market.

“From a licensing perspective this has been a fairly high growth area for us,” said Brooks, noting that the number of magazine and news publishers launching mobile offerings is increasing at a rapid pace, and that requires extra licenses for Getty’s images. Handset manufacturers also license the images to preload on the handset.

New Services
Getty Images has some new services planned, such as FotoMovil which target the Hispanic audience with news, sports and entertainment imagery accompanied with Spanish language text for $3.99 a month, similar to the current PictureCast service. FotoMovil has been approved by Sprint and Boost and will “launch any day now”, according to Brooks. Another service called FashionCast (obviously targeting the fashion conscious) which will launch soon, Getty quoting Q2 to be on the safe side. “You never know with the operators exactly when it will launch,” said Brooks, saying that the back-end processes and checks can hold up services.

The services are done via WAP, which Brooks said is the best format for on-demand information services like those offered by Getty, especially cross-region. That being said, the recent acquisition announcement by Getty of WireImage for $200 million (which will close in mid-April (release)) will give Getty some entertainment image and video services, as well as some mobile deals WireImage has with Java and Brew applications, which Getty will maintain.

Getty also hopes to use the WireImage entertainment video strength to launch video services. “There’s still a long way to go before mobile video and TV hit critical mass,” said Brooks, adding that as it picked up Getty is “very aggressively” going after the opportunity to build an entertainment channel, which would include video clips of 1-3 minutes. For long-form mobile TV programming Getty would license its content to a show producer.

International Expansion
Beyond that Getty is focusing on launching its services internationally. It already has licensing agreements for mobile products offered by telcos such as 3UK, Orange UK and Starhub in SE Asia, but the company hopes to deliver some of its own services. “We’re trying to identify what the best route for that is,” said Brooks, saying the company is investigating whether it should sell through carrier partnerships like it does in the US, partner with aggregators, go off-portal or something else. “In other parts of the world increasingly there is a growing off portal market.” Getty has strong relations in Western Europe, and the Australia team is “quite keen to do more and develop relationships” according to Brooks. Getty has two people on the picture desk in New York covering emerging markets, and it will do this in international markets as well.

The Future Is Ad-Supported
“[The mobile market] seems to be changing literally by the quarter so it’s difficult to say where we’ll be in five years, but it will remain a very important market for us,” said Brooks. One change that Getty anticipates is that the model will evolve — like the web began with subscription services and moved to advertising, so too will mobile. Getty is planning for that change; Brooks said that the company would probably work with one of the ad platforms initially because it doesn’t have any experience in selling ads.

“We’ve had discussions with operators and they’re happy to go that route,” said Brooks, adding that the services will probably still be subscription based for the rest of the year. This is because people are willing to pay and there’s still a lot of unsold mobile ad inventory. “We couldn’t generate the revenue we have now, but in the long term it could work,” he said.

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