Microstock photography giant Fotolia is launching a new site, called Flixtime, that allows users to create simple video slideshows. Similar to the simplicity of Animoto, Flixtime allows you to produce 60-second videos from your photos easily and quickly.
Once you register for a free account, you’ll be upload your own photos or stock photos from Fotolia’s selection of images. You can also upload your own music, or choose from Fotolia’s stock music collection. And you can add text to any slide as well.
Once you create a video, you can share the file to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other destinations. You can also choose to download the file to your computer for further editing. Check out the video I created in a matter of minutes here. Flixtime actually offers a considerable amount of stock photography and music to choose from; so it’s easy to make a pretty slideshow combining your own photos and Fotolia’s offerings. The music is powered by AudioMicro, a music startup that helps license stock audio files.
In my opinion, Flixtime is a more basic version of Animoto, which has been steadily ramping up its offerings. Fotolia took a massive round of investment last year from TA Associates last year and has been steadily growing its userbase. It reached one million registered users and five million images for sale last February, introduced microstock video in April, hired an iStockPhoto co-founder in May, and launched a royalty-free photo site called PhotoXpress. The site also rolled out an add-in ribbon for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2007 that gives users instant access to the company’s vast library of images and vectors from within the application.
Fotolia is a low-priced stock photography site, offering over 16 million images for publishing and advertising, at prices as low as $0.75 per photo. Unlike the two major players in stock photo sales (Corbis and Getty), Fotolia’s images are mostly from semi-pro and amateur photographers, though the photos are of similar quality. Fotolia photographers earn 30%-60% of the sales revenue from their images. In an effort to compete with Corbis and Getty, Fotolia introduced a service called Infinite Collection...
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