Digital media company Getty Images has announced it is partnering with Microsoft to bring new image-based products and services to Bing and Cortana.
Over the next few years, the two companies are going to be working together to provide immediate access to the Getty Images library in an effort to enhance the Microsoft user experience.
Getty Images Senior Vice President of Business Development, Craig Peters, explains:
“With our new partnership, Microsoft will use Getty Images’ latest API innovations and our award-winning visual content to take search experiences to a new level.
Our technology teams will work together to create beautiful, engaging applications and services for Microsoft users with licensed content and attribution for photographers and other content creators”
As a leader in digital media, Getty Images’ library contains over 180 million creative, news, sport, entertainment and archival images and videos.
The news comes only a day after new broke that the two companies settled a lawsuit filed last year. Getty Images alleged that the Bing infringed on Getty Images’ copyrights. More specifically, Getty’s issue was with the Bing Image Widget, which allows anyone to embed a panel on their site that displays images pulled from Bing’s image search.
Getty didn’t appreciate that the Bing Image Widget would display content owned by Getty without receiving any credit or royalties. Microsoft stopped offering the widget shortly after the lawsuit was filed.
The lawsuit was settled this past Monday, and the partnership between the two companies was announced on the following Tuesday. I guess you could say that escalated quickly.
With the two companies now working together it will interesting to see what new image-based functionally they can bring to web search. Microsoft has yet to comment on the partnership.
