The Press Association acquires EMPICS

EMPICS, the UK based international sports photography and photo marketing agency, which was established in 1985 and offers Picture Buyers a digitised sports photolibrary of over 650,000 images (another 1.4m images are held offline in physical storage), had been sold to The Press Association (PA), the national news agency of the UK and Ireland.
Combined, the two organisations have an archive of nearly 9 million news, celebrity and sport images, of which more than 1.5 million are available to customers online.
Among EMPICS photo marketing initiatives is its New Media Stills Production (NMSP) service. This delivers, via wireless technology, still images taken at events to customers within 20 seconds. This new service presents significant opportunities for The Press Association, packaging live images with real-time text and data.
EMPICS Chief Executive Phil O'Brien said: "For picture buyers, this deal offers a great opportunity to get the very best UK editorial photography combined with the well known standards of EMPICS service. In our companies' developing markets of new media, sports and celebrity, it delivers a compelling multimedia proposition combining the NMSP real-time photography product with PA's established live data services."
The Press Association is a private company with 27 shareholders, most of whom are national and regional newspaper publishers. The biggest shareholders are Associated Newspaper Holdings Limited, News International plc, Trinity Mirror plc and United Business Media plc.