Having worked as a digital content (videogame) journalist during the 00’s, I saw how user-generated and user-distributed digital content changed the industry. With 3D printing, the issue is going to scale up to a whole new dimension, since 3D printing means that all objects can also become digital content.
However, there are many lessons we can learn and mistakes we can avoid from how the movie, music, and video game industries (mis)handled the shift from physical distribution to digital distribution. Source3, a startup founded by former Google employees and music industry professionals, is here to assure us that some errors are not repeated by creating, from early on, a platform for large-scale licensing & distribution of 3D and user-generated content.
The goal is to help large content distribution websites, such as popular 3D printing marketplaces, but also consumer product giants like Amazon, to meet the real needs of designers. “We started developing the platform and launching a private beta testing phase first of all for us to develop a better product,” says Source3’s Director of Marketing Tom Simon, whom I finally caught up with, in spite of the 10-hour time zone difference between us. “We also did it for us to be able to go back to potential distribution partners and say to them ‘look, I know your API doesn’t do this today but designers are asking for it, se we can help you develop that part of the API in order to meet the designers future requirements.”
Now, Source3 is scaling up. The next stage, Tom told me, is to go into a much larger public beta and start advertising and communicating the platform in forums and tech media websites. The goal is to find out how many designers out there really have a need for digital distribution services.
What Source3 promises is to let designers everywhere simply upload a 3D model file and a texture to be rendered for online visualisation. While that is happening, the designer accesses a screen that lets him or her set the title, insert all metadata information, select categories and add tag words.
Once this phase is complete, all the designer has to do is select the marketplaces and e-tailers that s/he wants his or her product to be featured in and Source3 will do all the work. Personally, I know quite a few people that could already take advantage of this service, instead of manually uploading to Shapeways, i-materialise, 3DaGoGo, ToyFabb, Pinshape, Cults, Threeding, Shapetizer…
“Once a month, a revenue report comes from each of these marketplaces. We look at it and distribute the money earned to the designers based on how well their products sold. Give us your Pay{al account and we’ll deposit the money, and if you want to see a detailed report, we can provide the number of products sold, where the buyers are located, etc.,” Tom explains. “So, we’re slowly opening up this ecosystem of distribution marketplaces… The next step is to get beyond that and get closer to the more traditional marketplaces, like Amazon, or Etsy, as what we’re doing on the backend as well is forming relationships with 3D printing partners like White Clouds. If we set up for example your ability to distribute at Etsy, once the product is purchased it would send a a request to White Clouds to get it manufactured on demand.”
The bottom line is that Source3 is being created to enable designers to just focus on designing and not worry about distribution. The real “unicorn” that Source3 is chasing is a “derivative rights model”, working with top brands to create consumer products out of their IPs and distributing through all the 3D printing marketplaces that have been integrated into the network. As in the recent Capcom and Zverse collaboration for the Street Fighter videogame cover art, or the following one with CDbaby.
In order to achieve this, Source3 combined the experiences of two different “souls”. Some of the founders come from a digital rights management company called RightsFlow, which was created to manage royalties and licenses for digitally distributed music content. They were there when Sean Parker presented the Napster project to Universal Music in 2001 and the company was later acquired by YouTube. Another part of Source3 comes from Geomagic, which was acquired by 3D Systems and saw what happened with the home 3D printing hype.
With physical objects, everything is much more complex but there are services like 3D Hubs which, as Tom puts it, “are already very functional processes.” Others, like Autodesk Spark (which is one of Source3’s investors) are working to create the ecosystem for global digital manufacturing. This might not mean that giants of the toy or consumer product industry will see it as a threat but some of the smaller companies might. The digital manufacturing revolution is happening, preparing to manage it can only be beneficial for everyone. If I were a designer of 3D printable products, I would definitely give the beta a shot.
