Branded Entertainment Network

Lines of business

Branded Entertainment Network's businesses include product placement services, the celebrity photo agency Splash, as well as GreenLight, an online service that assists in licensing images, music, video, and personality rights for commercial use. BEN directly represents the personality rights of various figures, including Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Bruce Lee, Johnny and June Carter Cash, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, Muhammad Ali, Steve McQueen, and Thomas Edison among others.

Founding

Corbis is privately owned by Bill Gates, who founded the company in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems. Interactive Home Systems presented itself as an art licensing company; Gates envisioned a system in which users would decorate their homes with revolving displays of artwork, including works by notable painters, using digital frames and technology that had yet to have been developed. The company's name was changed to Continuum Productions in 1992 and later, to Corbis Corporation. Interactive television was suggested as a way to deliver the content, but as the development of the planned product was under way, Corbis focused on digitizing content and acquiring rights to images. Corbis signed agreements with the National Gallery of London, the Library of Congress, the Sakamoto Archive, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In October 1995, the company purchased the Bettmann Archive collection, which included the pre-1983 photo library of United Press International and its predecessor photo agencies, Acme and INP, the photo arm of the International News Service. Prior to acquiring the Bettmann Archive, Corbis represented roughly 500,000 images, a total that increased exponentially when the Bettmann drawings, artworks, news photographs, and other illustrations were added to the company's portfolio. In all the Bettmann Archive contained 16 million images. The archive was stored 220 feet underground in a refrigerated cave in the Iron Mountain storage facility,

In 1995 the company won a contract with its first major photographer, Roger Ressmeyer, followed by several more, including Galen Rowell; this signalled growing interest in the world of professional photography, which up to that point had not taken the company seriously. In 1996 the company acquired the exclusive rights to approximately 40,000 images photographed by wilderness photographer Ansel Adams.

In 1997, Corbis named company veterans, Steve Davis and Tony Rojas, co-CEOs. Corbis also hired David Rheins to run Corbis' Productions, and Leslie Hughes to lead the company's B2B image licensing division, Corbis Images. These hires marked the company's shift to a more market focused entity. Corbis Productions published several award-winning CD-ROM titles such as A Passion for Art: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Dr. Barnes, compiled from the Barnes Foundation collection, and Leonardo da Vinci, which showcased the Codex Leicester.

In 1998, Leslie Hughes was named President of Corbis Images. The company expanded internationally and through product development and further acquisitions. The company acquired Digital Stock Corp., a supplier of royalty-free images to further expand its offering. In 1998, another division was added to Corbis Images when the company acquired Outline Press Syndicate, Inc., a supplier of celebrity portrait photography. Renamed Corbis Outline, the company syndicated studio portraits and candid photographs of actors, musicians, athletes, politicians, business leaders, scientists, and other celebrities and provided the images for sale to a broad range of national magazines.

In June 1999, the company acquired the French news photo agency Sygma, adding 40 million additional images to the company's collection, and expanding Corbis's portfolio beyond 65 million images. The archive is today stored in a preservation and access facility outside Paris.

In 2000, Bill Gates purchased the rights through Corbis to an image that they had renamed Bliss. The image was taken in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County in California. The photo was taken by photographer Charles O'Rear in 1998. In 2001, Microsoft used the image as the default wallpaper for the desktop of Windows XP.

2000–2010

Corbis's business-to-business image licensing business expanded with the growth of the internet in the early part of the decade. The company also expanded geographically, making multiple acquisitions such as the Stock Market and expanding into the footage licensing market with the acquisition of Sekani.

2011–2013

2016: Sale of image licensing business

On January 22, 2016, Corbis announced that it had sold its general image licensing business, including the Corbis Images, Corbis Motion and Veer libraries and their associated assets, to Unity Glory, an affiliate of Visual China Group. The sale did not include the Corbis Entertainment business, which would remain owned by the company under a new name. Concurrently, it was announced that VCG would exclusively license distribution of the Corbis images library outside of China to its rival, Getty Images. VCG has historically served as the exclusive distributor of Getty content in China. Distribution of Corbis content will be transitioned to Getty's outlets, while the company will also manage Corbis's physical archives on behalf of VCG. Of the deal, Getty CEO Jonathan Klein remarked that after 21 years in business, it was "lovely to get the milk, the cream, cheese, yogurt and the meat without buying the cow."

In May 2016, following the handover of the Corbis images business to Unity Glory and Getty, Corbis Entertainment was re-named Branded Entertainment Network, and re-located its operations to Los Angeles. CEO Gary Shenk stated that the company had organized over 5,000 brand placements in 2015, with clients including Cadillac, Jose Cuervo, Microsoft, and others.