When V10 Entertainment — the production company and studio behind America's Funniest Home Videos — acquired Vin Di Bona Productions and its legacy media cloud, leadership knew they needed a media asset management system built for the future, not the past. Their previous MAM was struggling to keep pace, and the architecture couldn't grow with the business. V10 turned to IMT (Integrated Media Technologies) to help plan a new media tech stack from the ground up, using Iconik as its backbone.
Since migrating to Iconik, V10 has transformed every stage of their media supply chain, from UGC ingestion to FAST channel distribution, without outages, without IT bottlenecks, and with 300 users across internal and external teams operating smoothly every day.
Key outcomes include:
- 3 million assets managed in a fully cloud-native AWS media environment
- Thousands of UGC clips processed weekly through automated, custom-built workflows
- 300 users — internal creative teams, clearance coordinators, rights management staff, content partners, and a creator network — each with tailored access and streamlined interfaces
- Fewer support resources required, with no outages since going live
- Licensing powered directly by Iconik, with ClipTiger.com — V10's flagship licensing portal pulls metadata and search results from Iconik in real time
Meeting the demands of a media juggernaut
America's Funniest Home Videos has been collecting fan-submitted video clips since before "going viral" was part of the cultural vocabulary. Today, V10 Entertainment manages over three million assets in the cloud — a mix of user-generated content (UGC), episode masters, social media content, and material produced for FAST, OTT, VOD, and linear distribution.
When V10 acquired the production company behind AFV, leadership set out to find a MAM aligned with their new business initiatives. Their previous system presented several compounding challenges:
Technical instability consuming resources. Support tickets were a drain. Creative teams waited for issues to be resolved, and the organization had experienced outages. "Before Iconik, we were experiencing issues consistently, which required resources," said Bayard Jones, the SVP of Cloud Solutions at V10 Entertainment who oversaw the Iconik migration.
Metadata-based permissions that couldn't keep pace. Their legacy system relied on metadata to manage access, which created a fundamental problem: you can't always guarantee that assets carry the right metadata. With dozens of teams — each needing different levels of access to specific parts of the library — this approach was too fragile and too manual.
Scale and complexity that only grows. With thousands of clips flowing in weekly, multiple active productions, and a licensing business running off the clip library, V10 needed a platform that would never be outgrown.
A cloud-native MAM built for a custom workflow
V10 worked with IMT as their systems integrator, with North Shore Automation brought in to help accelerate the migration. Together, they moved three million assets off the legacy platform and into Iconik — no small undertaking, but one made significantly more manageable by Iconik's open API architecture.
Deep AWS integration. V10's entire technology stack lives in their AWS media cloud. Iconik's ability to connect natively with that environment made the process relatively frictionless. "Being able to connect to that storage and being able to integrate via the open API with our custom solutions is essential," Jones noted.
Open API for end-to-end custom workflows. V10 rebuilt their custom pipelines against Iconik's API:
- UGC uploaders on afv.com and the AFV mobile apps feed directly into an upload environment where AI auto-tagging fires before human moderators review and route content
- Custom moderation workflows approve UGC submissions and organize them into collections for granular library access
- Custom publishing solutions tie clips to show rundowns across productions
- Revenue-sharing partner download tracking is handled through custom integrations
- Publishing pipelines push content to AFV.com, the AFV mobile app, ClipTiger, fast/OTT/VOD platforms, and sharing workflows
ACL-based access control replacing metadata permissions. Iconik's Access Control List framework was a decisive factor in the platform selection. Rather than relying on metadata to gate access — an approach vulnerable to tagging inconsistencies — V10 now applies ACLs directly to collections. "You can't always be sure that assets have the right metadata that you need for permissions," Jones explained. With collections-based ACLs, building out access for a new partner or production team is a matter of creating a collection and populating it precisely.
AWS Rekognition integration for cost-effective AI tagging. Because scanning three million full video files for AI recognition would be prohibitively expensive, V10 built a smart integration: frames are extracted from incoming videos and run through AWS Rekognition for object, text, and facial recognition — capturing the value of AI tagging at a fraction of the cost. Onboarding to Iconik also allowed them to reduce their reliance on some of those Rekognition APIs, because Iconik's built-in AI transcription provides temporal metadata, enabling moment-level search and richer content context.
IMT and Iconik as migration and training partners. IMT managed the migration process and continues to develop custom solutions against the Iconik API. Iconik's team was involved well before go-live — helping V10 design the library structure, producing onboarding documentation, and building a user demo video still used to onboard new users today.
Immediate impact: Stability, efficiency, and scale
No issues, fewer resources. The shift to a SaaS architecture was an immediate operational win. "Iconik has enabled us to actually have fewer people providing support, and we've had very smooth sailing in terms of not having such issues," Jones said. For an operation of V10's scale, streamlining infrastructure translates directly to headcount and budget.
300 users, each with exactly what they need. V10 now has 300 users in Iconik — internal and external — each set up with custom interfaces and access scoped to their role. The result is both a security win and a UX win: users aren't navigating irrelevant content. "If they have access to more than they need, that just becomes noise that gets in their way," Jones noted. Tailored access means faster search, cleaner results, and a system that feels built for each user's specific job.
More content moderated, produced, and reviewed — faster. "We are able to moderate more content, produce more content, review and approve content more efficiently without having to download anything," Jones said. For an operation processing thousands of clips per week across multiple productions, those efficiency gains compound.
Automations that take metadata burden off creators. Getting creative teams to tag assets consistently is a perennial challenge. Iconik's collection-based automations solve it: when a clip lands in a designated collection, metadata is applied automatically. "It can be tremendously hard to get people to tag assets the way I would always want," Jones noted. "So it's nice to be able to say, 'hey, throw it in this bucket and it's going to go right.'"
ClipTiger.com licensing powered by Iconik. V10's flagship licensing portal — where buyers can find, preview, download, and self-checkout clips for use in productions — pulls its metadata, search, and discoverability directly from Iconik via the open API. The library that fuels ClipTiger is the same library the internal team works in every day, meaning licensing partners always have access to current, accurate asset information.
Adobe integration for social content teams. V10's digital team — producing content for social media — uses the Iconik Adobe Premiere integration to find clips, bring them directly into projects, and manage project assets without leaving their editing environment.
The takeaways
For large-scale media operations evaluating MAMs, V10's experience points to a few core lessons:
- Streamlined infrastructure has real ROI. Fewer support tickets, fewer outages, and fewer people managing infrastructure aren't soft benefits — they're measurable savings.
- ACLs beat metadata for permissions. Collection-based access control is more reliable, more flexible, and more scalable than metadata-dependent permission systems.
- Open API is non-negotiable for custom operations. If your business runs on custom workflows, your MAM needs to support them — including migration, new development, and third-party integrations.
- Match access to role, not just security needs. Scoping what users see to what they actually need isn't just about protecting assets — it's about making the system faster and easier to use for everyone.
- Choose a platform you won't outgrow. At 3 million assets and growing, V10 needed a MAM built to scale. "It's key for everything that we're doing that we have a MAM that we're not going to outgrow."
The operational backbone of the media supply chain
Iconik serves as what Jones describes as "the operational backbone of our media supply chain" — a single platform that connects UGC fans uploading clips on their phones to licensing buyers checking out content on ClipTiger, with dozens of production, post-production, digital, and rights management teams operating in between.
America's Funniest Home Videos has been capturing the best of home video for decades, viral before viral. V10 Entertainment is ensuring that library, and everything built on top of it, continues to grow.
.png)
