SmartFrame Technologies pitched itself as the way for rights holders to cut out the middlemen. Instead it became the middleman, a thinly capitalised one, and when it fell over in August the losses rolled downhill to the people least able to absorb them.
The London-based image-streaming platform entered administration on 26 August 2026 after failing to raise more money. New Zealand Rugby has lost a promised revenue share, and individual Kiwi photographers who shot the All Blacks and Black Ferns are still owed money, RNZ reports.
The lesson for any business outsourcing a core function to a digital platform is blunt. Platforms do not remove counterparty risk. They concentrate it.
A deal sold as independence
When the partnership was announced in July 2023, it was framed as NZR taking back ownership of its imagery from traditional photo agencies. Rights were assigned to NZR, publishers could embed official images free if they joined SmartFrame’s programme, and in-image advertising revenue was split between NZR, SmartFrame and publishers. SmartFrame contracted Action Press to hire and pay the photographers.
At the time, then-NZR commercial general manager Yarnie Guthrie said the union had “been able to win back the rights to our own imagery” while uncovering “a new commercial model that has huge potential”. SmartFrame chief executive Rob Sewell called it a “first-of-its-kind partnership” built on an ad-funded model “much like YouTube or Spotify”. Guthrie has since left NZR.
The pitch was reasonable. Sport bodies have long resented paying agencies for access to their own matches. But the structure swapped dependence on established agencies for dependence on a venture-funded startup that had to keep raising capital to survive.
The balance sheet told the story
SmartFrame looked substantial. By the end it hosted over 58 million images and more than 400 publishers, including Reach, The Independent and HuffPost, plus Premier League clubs Manchester City, Everton and Brentford and Six Nations Rugby.
The numbers underneath were thinner. At administration the company held total assets of £2.3 million but only £182,000 cash at bank, against total liabilities of £1.7 million, according to the same BusinessCloud filing summary. That is a business with real customers and almost no buffer.
Sewell admitted as much in a LinkedIn message, quoted by RNZ: “we didn’t get to the network scale required to become self-sustaining in time.” He said he was “truly sorry for those of you who SmartFrame were unable to pay at the end.”
That raises the harder question. If 400 publishers and 58 million images is not enough scale, a three-sided ad-funded marketplace carving revenue between content owners, publishers and the platform may simply not throw off enough margin to pay everyone fairly.
Freelancers sit at the bottom of the stack
The layering is what makes this instructive. NZR dealt with SmartFrame. SmartFrame dealt with Action Press. Action Press dealt with the photographers. Each layer put more distance between the people doing the work and the entity holding the money.
One photographer told RNZ he was still owed for work done in July. Another said he had received only 50% of what Action Press owed, with the rest promised “within a month”. Notably, the anger was aimed at SmartFrame, not the subcontractor, with one photographer saying Action Press had been “left holding the baby through no fault of their own”.
NZR, by contrast, can walk away. It has absorbed a lost revenue share it will not quantify and is contracting photographers directly again, including for the Nations Championship in the Northern Hemisphere. That is the 2023 deal fully reversed. Media outlets including the New Zealand Herald, which used SmartFrame embeds, also need new image supply.
Questions to ask before you sign
None of this is unique to sport or photography. Any business handing payments, content or IP management to a platform should be asking the questions NZR’s experience now makes obvious.
- What is the vendor’s runway? A glossy client list says nothing about cash at bank. Ask for it, or at least for evidence of funding beyond the next round.
- Who holds the money? If your contractors or revenue share flow through the platform, find out whether there is any direct contractual relationship if it fails.
- Where does your IP live? Assigned rights are worth little if the only copies and distribution infrastructure sit inside an administrator’s estate.
- Can you rebuild the function quickly? NZR could, because it once ran it. Businesses that fully hollow out an in-house capability may not.
NZR is a well-resourced national body with commercial staff, and it still ended up quietly writing off upside and rebuilding a function it thought it had outsourced for good. Smaller firms signing up to the next disruptive platform should assume they will fare worse.
The startup model will keep producing clever intermediaries, and some will succeed. But the cost of their failure rarely lands on the founders or investors who priced the risk. It lands on the freelancer waiting on a July invoice. Due diligence on a vendor’s balance sheet is not bureaucracy. It is the only insurance most contractors and rights holders are ever going to get.
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