FameFlynet
Overview
FameFlynet was one of the largest celebrity news photo agencies in the United States during the 2010s, created in January 2012 by the merger of two established Los Angeles paparazzi firms, Fame Pictures and Flynet Pictures. From its principal place of business in Beverly Hills, California, it supplied candid celebrity photographs and video — breaking entertainment news, red carpets, award shows, premieres and fashion shows — to magazines, newspapers, websites and broadcasters around the world, around the clock. At the height of its expansion it claimed a photo database of more than three million images, a network of hundreds of contributing photographers, and affiliate offices across Europe and Australia.
The agency's life was short but structurally important. FameFlynet embodied the consolidation of the celebrity picture business in the digital era: two rivals merged in 2012 to achieve scale, built a global affiliate network within sixteen months, experimented with live video streaming, and then, in 2016–2017, merged again — this time into the new super-agency BACKGRID, into which FameFlynet's name, along with those of AKM-GSI and Xposure, was folded. BACKGRID itself was acquired by Shutterstock in 2024, completing a chain of consolidation that began with the FameFlynet merger. This directory lists FameFlynet from Los Angeles, California.
The Merger of Fame and Flynet
The merger was announced at the start of January 2012. Fame Pictures, Inc. and Flynet Pictures had each been independently successful in the business for many years before combining. Their joint announcement presented the new agency as one of the largest and most powerful photo news agencies in America and around the world, specializing in the latest breaking celebrity news and in covering red carpet events, award shows, premieres and fashion shows. The merged operation traded heavily on reputation: its launch materials stressed professionalism, reliability and efficiency, and promised up-to-the-minute production and assistance 24 hours a day for a time-sensitive industry. Client logins migrated from the old Flynet site to the new fameflynet.com over the following weeks, with all new production appearing on the combined platform.
On the American side, the agency was led by Scott Cosman and Boris Nizon, who appear as FameFlynet USA's principals in the company's subsequent announcements; Nizon held the title of president. Court filings from its later copyright litigation describe FameFlynet, Inc. as a California corporation based in Beverly Hills that licensed candid celebrity photo and video content to premier entertainment print, online and broadcast outlets worldwide, maintaining a large library across celebrity, music, sports, fashion and entertainment subjects.
Services and Operations
FameFlynet's business was the classic paparazzi agency workflow at industrial scale. Staff and contributing photographers — the agency described a network of hundreds worldwide — pursued and covered celebrities in public places and at staged media events, filed images continuously, and the agency captioned, keyworded and distributed the sets through its web platform to subscribing picture desks. Speed and completeness were the product: entertainment news online had become a daily, then hourly, business, and the agency sold the ability to illustrate any celebrity story on demand.
In June 2013 it formalized that model in subscription packages aimed at web and publishing companies of all budgets: for a single monthly fee, clients received full access to the platform — searchable, fully captioned and keyworded celebrity photo sets, lightbox tools and high-resolution downloads, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The offer marked the industry's shift from per-image sales of exclusives toward subscription feeds, as online publishers' demand for volume outgrew the old auction model for all but the biggest exclusives.
Global Affiliate Network
Expansion was immediate. On May 15, 2012 — five months after the merger — FameFlynet launched affiliate offices across Europe, in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway, making its database of over three million images available in seven languages and announcing its aim to be a dominant force in celebrity photo delivery. The UK affiliate, based in London, was owned by John Churchill; the French affiliate, based in Paris, was led by managing director Michele Marchand, who framed the partnership as bridging relationships between the agency's American and European partners.
In May 2013, a year after the European launch, Snapper Media joined the network as FameFlynet Australia, strengthening the agency's position in Australia and New Zealand and opening routes into Far Eastern markets. By then the Australian partnership was the network's tenth territory, following the addition of Italy and Finland. President Boris Nizon described the agency as a dominant force across three continents — and said it did not intend to stop there.
Video and the POVee Experiment
FameFlynet also tested the adjacent business of live video. In July 2013 its London office launched POVee, a live-news-streaming venture that rolled out in time for the royal birth announcement that month, offering a subscribed embeddable feed to online news media. The Mirror online, the Huffington Post, Express online and Build TV in Germany were among the early adopters, and the agency reported more than 3.5 million viewers on the Tuesday morning of the launch event alone, after six months of testing. The experiment showed a photo agency attempting to convert its positions at news events — the stakeouts outside the hospital where the royal baby was expected — into a video product, taking its content, as its director put it, into a new digital age.
Clients, Copyright and the Business Model
FameFlynet's clients were the entertainment media economy of the 2010s: tabloid newspapers (its UK office celebrated its placements on Britain's red-top front pages at each year's end), celebrity magazines, entertainment television and the fast-growing celebrity-news websites. Like its competitors, the agency defended the value of its library aggressively in the viral-media era, bringing copyright actions over unlicensed use of its photographs — including a 2017 federal suit in California against Time Inc. alleging infringement and alteration of copyright management information. Such enforcement was not incidental; in a market where images were copied instantly across social platforms, the legal department was part of the revenue model, a point the agency's eventual successor, BACKGRID, made explicit in its own launch materials about vigorously enforcing intellectual property rights.
Absorption into BACKGRID
The end of FameFlynet as a brand came through the industry's next consolidation. BACKGRID was launched in January 2016 by three of the world's largest celebrity photo suppliers — AKM-GSI and FameFlynet in the United States and Xposure in the United Kingdom — opening first in Australia, where Scott Cosman and Boris Nizon of FameFlynet USA announced they were joining forces with their new partners, with Gemma Toogood helming the Australian agency, and then in Germany later that year. The convergence was completed on May 1, 2017, when BACKGRID opened in the United States and United Kingdom and the three founding agencies dropped their own names to operate under the single BACKGRID brand, described in the launch as creating the world's largest, most accessible and relevant celebrity photo agency.
The successor's assets traced directly back to its components: a vast archive of millions of celebrity and entertainment photographs and videos, thousands of new images added daily, its own ingestion, archival and distribution platform, and contributor-payment systems. In February 2024 Shutterstock acquired BACKGRID, adding more than 30 million images and videos and more than 1,400 contributors to its network, with BACKGRID chief executive Alex Kantif aligning with fellow co-founders including Dan Taylor, Steven Ginsburg and Scott Cosman — the FameFlynet principal whose presence in the successor's leadership closed the loop that began with the 2012 merger.
Legacy
FameFlynet lasted five years as an independent brand, but it is a clean case study of its industry's transformation: from rival Los Angeles paparazzi shops competing for the same celebrity on the same sidewalk, to merged scale, subscription distribution, global affiliates, video experimentation, and finally absorption into a platform business valuable enough for a public company to acquire. The photographs its photographers filed — the daily visual record of 2010s celebrity culture — remain in circulation inside the BACKGRID and Shutterstock libraries, long after the FameFlynet name came off the door.
Current Status
FameFlynet no longer operates under its own name. Its United States and international operations were rolled into BACKGRID in May 2017, and its archive and contributor network passed with BACKGRID to Shutterstock in 2024. The agency is therefore profiled here in the past tense, as a defunct brand whose content business continues within its successors.
