AND a few more things... imaging industry news highlights
Visual 1st Perspectives
December 16, 2020
The 2020 photo & video industry roundup:
6 major disruptions; the 270 companies on our radar
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2020: What a year!
Let’s start with the 6 major disruptions that have impacted most of us in the photo and video industry:
1. COVID changed everything, forcing major photo & video vendors and imaging startups alike to pivot, as consumers changed behavior, and channel partners or supply chain partners struggled, adapted, or thrived.
2. AI imaging solutions reached the masses through AI-powered smartphone cameras, photo management, photo editing, image compression, and auto-generated photo print product solutions.
3. Video creation, watching and sharing soared to a level that few of us had foreseen. The secret sauce that took video adoption to the stratosphere? It’s music attracting youngsters, duh…!
4. The larger photo print providers went on a merger and acquisition spending spree. Consolidation is upon us.
5. Imaging app subscriptions made perpetual licensing fees “so yesterday.”
6. Major cracks appeared in our visual social media juggernauts’ invincibility, with governments across the globe muscling up to rein them in and remove competitive barriers for the more nimble photo or video incumbents or startups.
What else happened in 2020?
We covered a lot of that in our (more or less) bi-weekly Visual 1st Perspectives newsletter.
For the first time this year we aggregated all 27 Perspectives pieces in one 91-page report, covering 270 companies.
Shutterstock. WordPress integration. Shutterstock launches WordPress plugin that suggests photos based on content through its Smart Image Recommendations API.
Perfect Corp. Snapchat integration. This year’s Visual 1st presenter Perfect Corp. (makers of the YouCam AR app) Perfect Corp. brings its beauty try-on experiences to the Snapchat platform, enabling brands to bring digital and AR experiences that they’ve already created with Perfect Corp. into Snapchat and turn those experiences into Snapchat Lenses which will live on their Brand Profiles.
VSCO. Going video. VSCO acquires Trash, makers of an app that uses AI to identify crucial moments in video footage and can automatically make cuts to help those with little editing skills produce a polished result. A year ago, VSCO acquired Rylo, a video editing startup founded by the original developer of Instagram’sHyperlapse.
Facebook. Going music video. Facebook publicly launches its collaborative music video app, Collab. Not a knockoff of TikTok as you might think: In the app, a “collab” is a selection of three 15-second independent videos, stacked on top of each other, that play in sync. For example, a collab could consist of a guitarist, drummer and a singer, each playing alongside each other in their respective videos.
