From cost center to creative force: How AI rights management maximizes revenue

Rights management can be a surprising path to revenue generation. Beyond freeing up storage space and consolidating costs, rights management adds a new layer of data to your content, which your team can then use to optimize content delivery, uncover new revenue streams, and greenlight projects faster.  

On September 13th, Backlight CEO Kathleen Barrett joined a panel of experts at the IBC conference in Amsterdam to discuss Banijay Group’s centralization of its media operations, AI’s role in media management, and more in “From Rights to Revenue: Unlocking Content Value in a Digital-First World,” hosted by AWS. 

Banijay Group’s digital transformation illustrates how this shift from cost center to revenue engine actually works in practice.

What media fragmentation looks like at scale

Banijay Group is the world’s largest independent production company, operating 140 labels across 23 countries with 200,000 hours of content and generating $3.5 billion in revenue. Despite this massive content library, their digital and social media revenue was below 1% of total revenue. This created an urgent need to consolidate their fragmented systems to unlock the commercial potential of their archives.

Banijay struggled with  inconsistent systems and disparate metadata. In addition, five years of aggressive growth through M&A deals meant that their content rights were scattered across disconnected storage vendors in several different countries. They needed to create a centralized media hub that maximized efficiency for their global team.

As Damien Viel, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer at Banijay Entertainment put it, “It was really time to look at the under-utilization of all of this content around the world and really get the technology right before we could accelerate the digital business and position of the company on a pure cross-channel approach.”

The foundation of creative operations: cloud and data layers

Global organizations with fragmented content libraries cannot move forward with digital production without first consolidating all assets in the cloud. 

"The cloud is the only option”
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— Alex Buchanan, Director of programs, Base

With 100PB of asset data scattered around the globe, however, Banijay couldn’t complete the transformation overnight. The migration required a methodical, multi-stage approach:

• Move all assets to the cloud
• Create a unified content view
• Add comprehensive metadata and rights data
• Enable actionable automation

The end goal? Build a fully programmatic distribution system for their media. They enlisted the help of managed services provider (MSP) Base to move all of their assets to centralized AWS storage. Base then helped Banijay build a user-accessible layer on top of the raw assets with Iconik.

This layered approach allows each component to do what it does best while maintaining flexibility:

AWS layer → Base layer → Iconik layer → integrations

Iconik plays a role not only in organizing media data and making it accessible, but also in creative collaboration.

 “Our approach has been to be a layer on top of all of that content and provide a proxy view of it. That kind of lowers the barrier to collaborate globally. Understand what you have in that media library. Then the next step is data. Metadata, but also rights data, any sort of data that pertains to a piece of content — every piece of media has its own data layer. And once you have those components, you can start to make media and data actionable.”
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—Kathleen Barrett, CEO, Backlight

With this foundation in place, Banijay could tackle the more complex challenge: making their vast archive actually usable.

When rights management becomes revenue generation

Legal rights present a challenge and an opportunity for wide-reaching organizations like Banijay. On the one hand, there’s a massive archive of content to pull from. On the other hand, it’s hard to know what’s useable and what’s not. 

With Iconik’s AI metadata tagging, Banijay can quickly and reliably identify exactly which assets they own the rights to. As Damien put it, even if Banijay only owns 5% of the rights to their content, that 5% becomes a global monetization opportunity. That 5% can be streamed, broadcast, and shared in various languages, in various formats, around the world, in the time it’d normally take to search for one asset and ask Legal to approve it for one show in one country.

“What is feasible in terms of rights management, thanks to AI, is something that is reshaping our ambitions permanently.”
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– Damien Viel

Beyond the efficiency gains, Kathleen views an AI-powered asset library as a site for creative experimentation.

“It's not just having literal search for your videos, but actually a deep understanding of the content you have, and suddenly, you're looking for emotions and moments and, ‘Show me every scene where two characters are making up after a breakup.’ I think it leads to a lot of new opportunities to find inspiration, but also create new types of storytelling and new types of assets.”
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— Kathleen Barrett

How AI acts as a force multiplier for media value

In practice, this AI-powered approach transforms creative decision-making in three key ways:

• Unlocking hidden value: Knowing which assets you own and being able to instantly search and repurpose that content means you can approve derivative projects (clip shows, compilations, social content, localized versions) that weren't economically viable before. You're not guessing about whether you can legally and profitably execute.
• Increasing speed to market: When someone pitches, "What if we did a best-of villains moments from all our Big Brother franchises?", you’ll immediately know if you have the rights to the clips, in which territories, and the commercial potential of each opportunity. Instead of weeks of research, you get answers in minutes, which means more "yes" decisions, faster.
• Data-driven optimization: Rights data combined with performance data creates what AWS’s Ian McPherson calls "yield maximization," a common practice in investment institutions. You can model the ROI of a project before committing resources, making it easier to justify creative decisions to stakeholders.

The real value of an AI-powered, cloud-based content library isn't automating manual tasks—it's enabling fundamentally new capabilities. Archives become active assets. Rights data becomes strategic intelligence. Creative decisions become data-informed. The companies gaining ground aren't using AI to do the same things cheaper—they're using it to unlock revenue streams and creative opportunities that were previously too complex or costly to pursue.