Image licensing for publishers and broadcasters

Fast Media is one licensing desk for newsrooms, magazines, broadcasters and book publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium: editorial wire, creative stock and specialist archives ordered from a single account. Our supplier integrations are Solwee and Newscom for editorial wire, Dreamstime and DepositPhotos for creative stock, and Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay for free sources. Through them we license from around 27 archives and collections, among them Avalon, Belga, Robert Harding, Heritage and Universal Images Group. The platform is independent of any one agency, so the desk chooses on the picture rather than on the contract.

Every licence states rights, territory and print run, so an editor knows before publication whether the image covers a cover, a reprint, a regional edition or a broadcast use. That detail sits with the file rather than in a separate mail thread, which matters when a story moves from online to print or a programme is repeated. Each download also comes with a licence certificate, so the desk can show per image what was licensed, for which use and when, without reconstructing the order afterwards.

Your own archive is searched alongside every commercial source, so a picture desk sees what the title already owns before it spends again on the same frame. Owned, licensed and created media appear in one grid, with team libraries, projects and share links, so a commissioned shoot from last season is as findable as a wire frame from this morning. Editors working across desks and titles look in one place, and the same image is not bought twice by two people on the same week.

One desk means one supplier relationship: quotes and purchase orders, EUR VAT invoices from an EU supplier in Amsterdam, plans, seats and teams per title or programme. Finance receives invoices in a familiar format and procurement deals with a single contract instead of a folder of agency accounts. Seats and groups can follow your structure, so a magazine, a newsroom and a broadcast production each work inside their own library while the organisation keeps one overview of what is licensed.

Activity reporting and renewals let a publisher see usage across desks and titles and keep licences current without chasing individual editors. When a term approaches its end, it is visible in the platform rather than in someone's calendar. Where an image does not exist, Create adds AI generation, background removal, extension, keywording and compression inside the same library, so a cover crop or a cleaned-up background is produced next to the licensed material instead of in a separate tool.

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