Seoul’s D’Strict Is Licensing Some Of Its Spectacular Motion Creative For LED Video Wall Owners

January 11, 2022 by Dave Haynes

The South Korean digital media design studio d’strict, which has developed some of the more visually amazing content pieces seen on indoor and outdoor video walls, has launched a web site that makes some of its creative work available to third parties through licensing.

That means some of the wild, inventive pieces put out by d’strict can be on video walls elsewhere in the world, without the end-user or media owner having to commission original work, and presumably at a more affordable fee (quality original creative is rarely inexpensive).

“This platform,” says d’strict, “is an online marketplace designed to be able to showcase and trade the works created by #dstrict and other global media artists. We ask for your continuous interest and support on this, and any media artists who wish to take on new challenges together, please feel free to contact us anytime.”

The enterprise licensing set-up is built around the notion of populating a single video wall for a year with as many as eight original d’strict pieces. The USD cost for a one-year enterprise license is $45,000, or about $5,600 for each. That may seems like a lot of money for content you are only renting, but you’d pay many, many multiples of that to get this level of content commissioned as original, owned pieces.

Here’s a sample piece:

The d’strict team does amazing work – among the best in the business – so this represents an opportunity for companies that have big LED video walls to populate a video wall with top tier work, and maybe not see the overall budget clobbered by the cost of a single piece. Even the most compelling work will turn into wallpaper after a while if it is the only thing running, hour after hour, day after day. Variety is good.

The only down side to this is perhaps the argument that these pieces are very high-end fillers that won’t likely have any relation to the space or place or brand. So this material could on the video wall in the lobby of a big bank, for example, but it’s not going to say anything about the institution, its people or the location. That’s not necessarily bad, but owners have to understand they are buying completed, rendered material that’s generic in its own way. Customization could be done, since d’strict owns the source files, but there would very likely be more cost.

The other minor issue is exclusivity. If I was a building owner and licensed this material, I wouldn’t want to walk three blocks over and see it on the screen in the office tower lobby of a competing property owner. But that could happen, I suppose, unless some sort of territory thing could be worked out (doubt it).

I think this is clever. A design studio is likely to have a lot of original material languishing on hard drives, and this scheme can “sweat” those assets. You have to assume some of the studio’s output is solely owned by the companies that commissioned and paid for them, but there’d be a lot more that could be re-marketed like this.

The digital signage and pro AV industries are much more experienced now about video walls, and I hear fewer stories about big dollar projects going in that have little or no content strategy. But content is and always will be an issue. This sort of thing helps address that.

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