Frequently Asked Questions
General
Yes, there are a number of ways we can offer a solution depending on your current setup. You can have a B2C online solution offering your arts to consumers and have the printing done by yourself or by another print service provider. In the B2C solution you can let partner sites such as galleries or other print service providers get access to your images without having t pass on the original hi-res image. Finally you can add your catalogue to our existing inline images and generate extra royalty revenue from other online providers.
Here are some commonly used terms and abbreviations and their meaning:
W2P = Web-to-Print, refers to doing print e-commerce business via the web for commercial users or general consumers online
AOD = Art-on-Demand, also known as Print-on-Demand is a variant of web-to-Print where selling high value art prints can be achieved securely and safely online by streaming the images for prints without the need to pass original hi-res mages to the printing entity
POD = Print-on-Demand, process of printing when requested on demand immediately without having to pre-print stock or wait for prints to be delivered.
B2B = Business-to-Business, suggestion the solution is for businesses offering products to partners and other businesses. generally means not public facing and hence accessed via dedicated portals and login pages.
B2C = Business-to-Consumer, covers most online businesses offering solution to consumers online through publicly accessed websites. The main element of B2C will be an additional payment facility where products are purchased online.
Giclée = Giclée printing is a process that uses fade-resistant, archival inks and archival substrates to print on large format printers with high gamut colour accuracy and prints that are high-fast and not water-soluble.
PSP = Print service Providers, refers to print businesses with sufficient capacity to offer printing services externally.
Licensing & Pricing
There are many solutions and configurations achievable and actual pricing depends on what element of the system are deployed and the size and number of sites. have a look at our Pricing page and also contact us with your requirements, we will be happy to send you a personalised proposal and quotation.
Every publisher, artist or image right owner uploading and adding their images to our system are offered a licensing agreement to protect their copyright and set out the terms of use and royalty payments. The emphasis is on the use of the image by our system and we do not buy or own the images which shall remain with the copyright owner. Contact us and we will be happy to send you a sample agreement for your perusal.
Printing
As an artist and image owner it is important that your work is reproduced in the best quality output according to your set restrictions to protect your brand. There are a number of controls and restrictions built in the system to ensure no one can use the images in the way not permitted. Additionally since we also control the printing as part of our solution, we can ensure highest quality output only on permitted medial and printers to achieve the best colour matched giclee prints.
Our solution allows dispatch of online orders to any print station around the world. you can partner with a third party print service provider to do the printing and our systems ensure correct delivery and printing at the partner site. alternatively we can introduce trusted print fulfilment partners we work with for you to work with.
Application
Our online solution only displays lo-res images in the browse catalogue which is sufficient for screen resolutions. You may chose also to add watermark text to the thumbnails so that even lo-res images are protected. The hi-res images are not used online and streamed encrypted for printing and never passed to the client.
Yes, you can have your own private catalogue added to your AOD solution and also chose if you wish to offer them to other AOD users and generate external royalty revenue.
We offer a full range of client web apps for various vertical markets. Our client web apps include: Poster, Canvas, Wall-Art, Metal, Photo Album, Calendar, garment and many more constantly being added. You can find a suitable client app for your Web-to-print solution from our existing catalogue or have a bespoke solution developed for you.
Yes, each image uploaded into system can have a total number of times it can be printed overall. You have control to set the vaue at anytime and release more prints if required. We also partner with third party supplier of smart tags to control and authenticate printed outputs as limited edition.
Financial
As well as ad-hoc reporting facilities allowing various stakeholders to generate activity reports, we have a online live dashboard showing various key parameters of the live system.
As a publisher/Artist/Image Right owner you can monitor the use of images and teh resultant royalties accursed at anytime.
As a print service provider/website owner you can monitor orders, royalty and print costs from orders received online at anytime.
As a publisher, artist, image rights owner if your images are used by other W2P/AOD customers for printing, each print output royalty is calculated per instructions set by yourself at the time of upload. The royalty is calculated per square inch/centimetre and type of media printed. All royalties are accounted and quarterly usage and payment is done to the image rights owner.
if you are using our products as part of your own online solution then any royalties are built into output print price which you will be collecting directly anyway but we still provide reports and usage statistics for your internal use.
Image rights owner sets image royalty costs per square inch/centimetre of output print for each media supported by the system. When users browse and select an Image for printing, the cost of royalty is calculated per size and media type selected and presented. The user can then accept before printing or select another image or size.
Once accepted and paid for, jobs are submitted and images are streamed for printing which can only be printed once per design accepted on the chosen media. No file footprints are left on workstation and all printer hardware caching is disabled disabling reprints outside the system.
Our intelligent printing software communicates bidirectionally with the printer and monitors the status of the job under print. When the job has been successfully printed, the information is relayed back to our cloud centre to initiate royalty charges for the image printed.
When printer reports a failure of output, the print station reports back to our cloud centre to trigger a new print without additional charge being triggered.
We offer connection to all major payment gateways for B2C solution which enables online payments via credit/debit cards and/or PayPal as well as other forms of online payments. For B2B solution the authorised users of the system can purchase against credit/overdraft accounts controlled by system administrator.
Technical
Print Streaming is a unique technology developed by us that gives owners of digital images the opportunity to get paid per print without giving customers access to full images. Print Streaming prepares and optimises and streams data securely to printers without the need to pass the original hi-resolution file.
Our Print Streaming technology enables Art-on-Demand data transfer. Ensuring your content is protected from intellectual property theft, that integrity of the image is maintained, and that you get paid per print. Authority to print and print rule instructions can be centrally administered and updated from the cloud tools.
Security and safeguarding the image rights management is the most important aspect of Art-on-Demand delivery. Our entire solution has been developed from the ground up with security in mind. We have built various levels of protection to ensure highest level pf security.
Images encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit symmetric multiple keys for upload from within the image owner secure environment.
All data in transit is encrypted and is transferred via SSL-encrypted endpoints using HTTPS protocol tunnels during both uploads and downloads.
secure private cloud Vault with multiple access control mechanism: firewall, multiple access keys, alarm event notification and access logs
Print
Access to original data is only granted to approved print stations. Encrypted images are streamed and decrypted to memory in bands with no footprints anywhere.
Upload
Transfer
Storage
By utilising the latest available advanced cloud computing infrastructure platforms we can ensure highest level of reliability and security, only seen in mission critical applications.
We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud infrastructure and deployment services, trusted by the largest enterprises around the world.
Cross-region replication provides automatic , fast, reliable data replication across multiple data centres worldwide. Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.
Data is stored in highly durable vault using storage infrastructure designed for mission critical and primary data storage. All data is are stored in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility
Designed for 99.9999999999% durability and 99.99% availability over a given year, often surpassed.