6 Sight Presentation

Copyright Brownstein & McCabe Associates

Photography’s Growing Crisis in Consumer Relevance


A 125 Year Old Compact With the Common Man

You push the button, we do the rest.George Eastman touting the Kodak camera in 1888


Photography Was Never Really About Making Prints!

• It enabled recording personal and family events

• It enabled sharing those memories

• It enabled “time travel” to past events


The Digital Promise

• No film purchase required• Instant Capture Confirmation…”it came out”• Improved quality through digital technology• Lossless replication• Instantaneous non print sharing • Exciting “compendium” opportunities


We Have a Long Way to Go!

• Since the dawn of internet imaging the consumer photo market has split into 2 distinct groups

• The switch to digital photography has left a very large group of mass market consumers behind!

• At least 80% of mass market photo activity remains retailer kiosk based


In the analog world, we spent years and millions to help mass market consumers load a camera


In Digital, we need to figure out how to help them unload the camera!


Is this the Death of Consumer Photography or just a Midlife Crisis

It all depends on what we do…today!


We Can’t Rely on the Historical Market Leaders

The Majority of revenue in analog photography was from film, paper and chemistry…without it they can no longer afford to lead!

Key photo service providers are fragmented and forced to rely on proprietary, “turn key”solutions from the historical market leaders


Our Dilemma

• Consumers are taking far more pictures than ever before

• Explosive growth in low cost, high technology capture and display devices

• Literally billions of images are shared on networks like Facebook, Flickr, Google Albums, etc

…and nobody is making money!


Digital Technology can be at once, the cause and the solution to the

our problem


Evolving Tools• Ubiquitous broadband wireless• Rapidly growing memory card capacity• Plummeting Cloud storage costs• Broadband access at home and retail• Growing penetration of image capture capability in every personal device

• Extremely motivated consumer facing partners• No shortage of creative developers with new ideas


The enemy, my friends, is neither the web, digital content, nor social media. The enemy is the print industry’s own resistance to change and continued reluctance to embrace the benefits of new communication methods

Jason Miletsky, Picture Business Mobile and Mibile Lifestyle


I would put it a little differently…

The enemy, my friends, is neither the web, digital content, nor social media. The enemy is the photo industry’s inability to embrace the benefits of new communication methods


Wish #1

Every picture of you, by you and shared with you, is secure yet accessible anytime, from any device or location and suitable for any use.


The consumer already understands the magic of the model!


Many have key pieces


What we need• Widespread Industry Support and Preservation of JFIF/IPTC

tagging– Source “trackback” support for subsampled images– Social Network metadata update APIs– Automatic required resolution fetch at image render

• Integral “Plus” support for professional and licensed images• Automatic post “pipes” to social networks• Completely transparent upload to cloud account• Open Cloud storage put and fetch APIs• Multi capture device support


Wish #2

The ability to use a wide variety of desktop, web and personal device tools to easily compose “compendium” works using images, text and graphics and share to virtually any display or output device.


What we need

• Universal, open format for un‐rendered screens/pages

• Inherent support for multi‐screen/multi page

• Embedded fonts

• Open ended to allow support of current and future device specific capabilities


A Possible Solution

• Microsoft XAML, XPS open specification

• Already supports un‐rendered images, fonts and graphics…embedded application and display code

• Allows JIT photo optimization and text edits before soft or hard copy rendering


Past success in the consumer market has always been about watching

consumers, identifying real problems and disguising “what the consumer really needs” as “what the consumer

really wants”

Real Consumer Markets are Different…