LicenseStream

LicenseStream is an adaptive licensing and revenue automation platform running as a managed exchange service. It offers a one-stop shop where you can protect, license and receive royalties for your digital content. We take raw content and transform it into fully licensable media with complete revenue-generating transaction capabilities.

Our “licensing-with-a-click” platform guides you step-by-step through the entire licensing process. We help you register your content, assign rights, track and manage royalties and bill and collect fees automatically. Our standards-based services reduce complexity and speed the pace of transactions so that content can be licensed in minutes instead of months to drive both revenues and profit growth.

With LicenseStream, we provide many services to help you select and prepare your content for licensing quickly and efficiently. With LicenseStream, you can:

• Select content from your LicenseStream collection or immediately upload new content to start the licensing process.
• Select your licensing method by choosing from commonly used licenses to broad usage packs. Alternatively, you can use an existing license profile that you have previously created and stored. LicenseStream′s guided menus make it easy to enter the required licensing parameters for the licensing method chosen.
• Review the license statement and license fee that is automatically calculated by LicenseStream. LicenseStream uses industry standards plus business intelligence to derive license fees.
• Review the royalty profile for the licensed content and make any required changes. The royalty profile allows the content owner to distribute royalty to any party they want to include for the transaction.
• Execute the transaction which notifies the licensee and gives them instructions on how to pay for the license. Once paid, the licensee is instructed on how to download the content.
• Automatically calculate the royalty for each transaction, which is paid to the content owner and all other royalty participants on a timely basis.

We provide efficient licensing and billing solutions to reduce processing costs by as much as 90 percent. With our automated, standards-based platform and applications, we connect buyers and sellers to find, buy and settle royalty payments in minutes instead of months.

To license content previously required arduous, person-to-person negotiations that often took weeks and months. Content creators had to contend with non-standardized licensing statements, manage their own invoicing, billing and collections, forcing them to put as much effort into the business of licensing the content as they had put into creating it. Our solution leaves them much more time to create. In addition, we are opening an array of transaction markets that allow the unrestricted flow of digital content between them.

LicenseStream provides an avenue for licensing content never before accessible to small providers. Small content producers can set their own pricing and be independent of any paperwork hassles, middlemen, price generation/‘what do I charge?’ hassles. They also gain license history tracking functionality that can be tedious and time-consuming for a small producer. Until now, smaller content producers had to handle sales themselves, or be 'middled' by a large image stock house and wait for months to get content sales settled.

We really don′t have any direct competitors. There are companies that do pieces of what we do, but none that offer an adaptive licensing automation platform or a comprehensive, suite of applications and tools for use with licensing all types of digital media, connecting buyers and sellers to find, buy, and legally settle royalty payments in minutes, rather than months.

In the licensing, tracking and settling of digital content, our platform handles all types of content (music, video, images, text, illustrations) mashed up or not, and for all content owners big or small. We expect Rich Media Applications from major ad networks will drive additional market demand for our services.

We provide a complete licensing, billing and settlement solution that gives you the visibility and control over licenses, royalties and transactions so you can respond to results quickly and drive your business to the next level.

We are adding third-party services once a license is generated, such as content tracking from partners to find illegal usage (we call this service Content Compliance).

LicenseStream is adding a number of online content sources that the content provider may want to publish their content and potentially generate significant licensing revenue. One such source is Google base which allows for the automatic publishing of content from LicenseStream. The published content can be grouped into a content provider portfolio. Once on Google Base anyone who searches Google can find that content which links back to the licensing and transaction services of LicenseStream.

We charge an annual subscription fee for our “licensing with a click” back office services. We also charge between 5% and 10% of the license fee depending upon which license and transaction services are selected by the content provider.

LicenseStream can now be accessed directly from Adobe Bridge CS3 via an Adobe Flash Plug-in that initiates the licensing process, and then seamlessly allows the user to continue the licensing process in LicenseStream.

By offering access to LicenseStream through Adobe, we are enabling the marketplace by making it much easier to access and use a standardized licensing process. In addition, we are allowing any creator to be in the content licensing business worry-free and without having to deal with a middle man. Now content creators of all sizes will have more freedom to choose providers by knowing that they can easily and properly license content without going through a middleman.

Individual creators can use ImageSpan to offer their digital content for sale in their own online store, allowing anyone to purchase and acquire the content under the licensing considerations that the content creator chooses.

Links to LicenseStream from Adobe products seamlessly guide creative professionals through the content licensing and billing process and empower them to define licensing parameters, as well as price and license content. For the large content producer, this direct control can shave months and millions of dollars a year off content licensing costs ‾ costs usually spent on person-to-person negotiations and attorneys fees.

PLUS is the Picture Licensing Universal System, a coalition that has developed licensing standards adopted by several leading companies. ImageSpan is a trusted solution provider and the exclusive license automation provider to the PLUS Coalition, the global standards organization for the image licensing industries.

ImageSpan has created a Flash Application that allows Adobe users to start a full PLUS Standard compliant license transaction in Adobe Bridge and complete it in LicenseStream. Adobe is a critical adoptee of PLUS because 80 percent of all creative professionals use Adobe.

Our powerful License Stream search engine delivers the proper immediately licensable content, based on any number of criteria, to any type of medium usable for all print, video, image and audio display formats.

LicenseStream can provide services for any intellectual property even content that is not currently digitized. The minimum requirement is that a small digital sample such as a thumbnail or small clip be available to describe the content on the LicenseStream platform. All content must have a method of delivery and on LicenseStream the most common method is digital file transfer. If other methods are required such as shipping of the content it must be clearly specified in the license.

While we provide suggested guidelines, the buyer and seller ultimately determine the terms of each license. LicenseStream offers many methods of deriving a license and will do its best to guide you through the license creation process. Ultimately, the user has full control over the license terms.

LicenseStream also provides rights and license history tracking and will require that some basic parameters be stored to enable efficient, accurate and complete rights protection.

Let′s start with pricing. We pre-fill a 'suggested' price point for the content based on the usage selected for licensing content by the provider to a buyer. The price we suggest is based on our ongoing pricing surveys and enterprise deployments we do. The content provider can change the suggested price at will and at any time prior to licensing. Once the content is licensed, the content provider can complete the transaction privately or through LicenseStream.

The buyer and seller generally agree on length of license, geography and platform. LicenseStream will still manage, track and store the license, rights and permissions and pricing generation as well as the history even if we do not do the ecommerce transaction.

The buyer can propose a price and the content provider can accept it or change it for review and acceptance by the buyer.

The royalty arrangements for each license transaction are reviewed by the licensor prior to the completion of the transaction. Once the transaction is executed the royalty payment records are automatically generated for each royalty participant. Upon payment of the transaction by the licensee, those royalty records are marked as ready for distribution.

Royalty payments can be performed either in monthly batches where each royalty participant receives a royalty statement and payment for all transactions paid in the previous month, or on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

Our system empowers you to review transaction histories and click in to review the progress of a transaction at every stage.

• A full transaction and rights history is stored and can be reviewed by date range or by content item or group.
• All invoices and payments are available for review at any time and are available for review by transaction stage, date range, licensee or content item or group.
• All royalty transactions are stored and available for review. Royalty transactions can be accessed by the royalty process stage, date range, licensee, royalty participant and content item or group.

Notification of the transaction and the invoice are sent to the content provider via email and stored in the LicenseStream′s database. A content provider may use LicenseStream to review transaction status and history at any time.

Notification of payment will be sent to you via email and stored in the LicenseStream database, where you can view transactions and royalties at any time.

LicenseStream provides a complete history of licenses issued as well as their terms and conditions, including expiration dates.

Soon, LicenseStream will add this feature, so that users receive notice of the need to renew a specific license well in advance of its expiration date.

Yes. You can organize your content by groups, making it easy to review and evaluate the sales and licensing performance of a category.

While we will never be able to stop people from altering digital content, we assign a unique identifier to all content. Each interaction of that content is recorded in the ImageSpan Registries and both a rights profile and license profile are kept on a real time basis. These registries can be queried at anytime to give an accurate view of a specific license, available rights or a license history.

In addition, ImageSpan works with a number of companies that can use visual recognition and other tracking methods to identify content or parts of content used throughout the internet or broadcast media.

In the very near future, should LicenseStream find content it handles posted on a Web site without a license, it will issue a bill. If that bill goes unpaid, it will issue a take-down notice.

Once a piece of content is licensed legally it should remain on the internet for the term of that license unless there is a compelling circumstance to ask the licensee to cancel the license.

If the content provider decides to stop offering content for license then LicenseStream will reject any new request to grant a license for that content.

Prominent examples of companies using LicenseStream include Zimmerman Advertising, an Omnicom Group agency, which has embedded ImageSpan′s licensing automation technology, LicenseStream, into its Pick-n-Click Ads.com™, the world′s first virtual advertising agency.

In addition, Individual content providers running their own small businesses are using LicenseStream to manage their content and provide all of the license and transaction services for their business.

Additional sevices ImagSpan offers include: CurbStream, ImageSpan′s local content creation network.

• CurbStream provides a local on-demand advertising content network. With CurbStream, ImageSpan has access to more than 10,000 videographers and independent photographers available to shoot and upload raw content on demand for any advertising or video content creation network via a simple-to-use interface. The content is then immediately rights cleared and licensable for use.
• OneStream, an application that offers on-demand access to millions of rights-managed images.