SellYourAIData
Get a free valuation Contact

AI Data Deal TrackerDeal brief

×

Shutterstock grants Synthesia a research license to its HD and 4K video library

Synthesia said its researchers will use Shutterstock's HD and 4K video library to explore pre-training its EXPRESS-2 avatar model, under a research license that can be extended to commercial use. Financial terms were not disclosed.

April 10, 2025 Synthesia said its researchers will use Shutterstock's HD and 4K video library to explore pre-training its EXPRESS-2 avatar model, under a research license that can be extended to commercial use.1

Terms of the deal

Synthesia will use Shutterstock's content library to research new ways to pre-train EXPRESS-2, which it expects to power a new generation of AI avatars.1 The license is a research license that Synthesia can extend for commercial use, and the post does not say whether or when it would.1

Background

Press Gazette's tracker lists the Shutterstock video library deal with Synthesia under April 8, 2025, as a research license that may later become commercial, with terms undisclosed.2 Synthesia's own post is dated April 10, 2025.1

What it means for data sellers

Stock libraries can sell tiered access, starting with research use. Sellers can reserve commercial rights for a second, separately priced step.

How the deal came together

  1. Synthesia announces the partnership. Synthesia published the announcement on April 10, 2025.
  2. A research license first. Synthesia's R&D team gets access through a research license, with the option of extending it for commercial use.
  3. Selected clips. Researchers will choose HD and 4K clips that improve existing datasets, such as cinematic videos of people doing professional tasks and workplace interactions.
  4. No financial terms. The announcement does not disclose any amount.

Takeaways for companies with data

  • A staged license, research first and commercial later, lets a buyer test data before paying for production use.
  • Buyers choose subsets of a library that fill gaps in their own data.
  • The terms were not published, so the price of the research stage is unknown.

Sources

Every numbered reference above points to an entry here. Figures come from these pages as of the date shown at the top of the article. Where a source reports a number it got from unnamed people, the text says so.

  1. Partnering with Shutterstock to accelerate our AI research efforts (Synthesia, April 2025)
  2. News publisher AI deals and lawsuits tracker (Press Gazette, 2026)

###

About the AI Data Deal Tracker

SellYourAIData tracks publicly reported sales and licenses of data to AI companies, with the price, terms and sources for each. Entries are checked against public reporting and updated as deals change. SellYourAIData was not involved in this deal. To ask what your company's data could sell for, get a free valuation. To report a deal, contact us.