Nowadays nearly everyone has a mobile device with a video and still camera on it, and nearly everyone puts the best of that media to the Internet, whether it be to post photos to Flickr or Facebook, or uploading videos to YouTube. But even though there’s a growing demand for more of this amateur and semi-professional content, there aren’t very many great tools for making it available to those who want to license and use it.
That could change, with the release of T3Media’s Paya platform, which will provide a self-serve marketplace to let anyone make his or her content licensable. Using Paya, content creators will be able to ingest content from various platforms where it already exists — such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Facebook — and add “buy” links to it, quickly and easily.
It also lets sellers set their own licensing terms and pricing. But the best part is that sellers take 80 percent of all sales. That’s a great number when compared to other platforms, which generally take more than half of all licensing revenue as their cut.
T3Media — previously Thought Equity Motion — has spent the last several years delivering cloud-based content management and licensing for a number of major media companies, including the likes of Paramount, Sony Pictures, the NY Times, CBS News, the NCAA, National Geographic, and HDNet.
Now it’s opening up all the technology and infrastructure it’s built to support those clients, and coming to market with a product that will allow amateur and semi-professional content creators to also monetize their videos and photos. Paya, the platform it’s unveiling today, hopes to emerge as the largest index of licensable photo and video content worldwide.
Paya also provides a number of tools to help buyer discovery. While those who wish to license content can go to the Paya site to do so, T3Media recognizes that most video will be watched elsewhere, and photos are likely to be found on the origin site. So it provides an auto-tagging feature to instantly provide links on different pieces of content that funnel back to the licensing page.