Overview
Scale is no longer the story. Control is.
The past decade democratized creation. Now, organizations of all sizes can produce media at scale. The next era of media won’t be defined by volume or velocity. It will be defined by media efficiency: the ability to find, move, reuse, monetize, and retire content intelligently.
01 Asset growth
Iconik indexes assets stored in the cloud and on-premises, so teams can access both from one interface.
02 Data growth
Data stored in Iconik grew to 324 petabytes (PB) in 2025, expanding 56% (117 PB) from the previous year.
This report is not just a snapshot of growth
— it’s a call to adapt.
Volume is no longer a differentiator
When everyone can publish at scale, content volume becomes background noise. The winners are the teams that can surface the right content at the right moment, without friction.
Operational debt is now a creative risk
At dozens of assets, inefficiencies are tolerable. At millions of assets, they compound fast. Poor metadata, fragmented storage, and manual review processes don’t just slow teams down — they limit creative potential.
Creative Ops is becoming a profit center
Creative Operations teams sit at the intersection of cost, speed, and quality. They decide whether assets are reused or recreated, archived or lost, discoverable or forgotten. At scale, these decisions directly affect margins.
Storage strategy is a business strategy
The data shows a stable hybrid reality: cloud and on‑prem aren’t competing solutions — they’re complementary. The real differentiator is lifecycle intelligence: knowing which assets stay hot, which moves cold, and which can be retired.
AI only delivers value when operations are ready
AI-powered search, transcription, and analysis unlock value — but only when assets are organized, accessible, and trusted. AI amplifies operational maturity; it doesn’t replace it.
Trend 01 — The scale of content explosion
324 Petabytes.
1,033 years of video.
Content creation isn't just growing; it's accelerating at a pace of 11.1 terabytes every single hour.
+57%
Assets per day
+55%
Data per day
+21%
Video assets per day
+45%
Audio assets per day
A working library
Iconik manages 346M "Other" assets—including 8.2M project files. Not just archives, but actual works-in-progress.
The velocity
We now add a new 4K blockbuster worth of content (100 GB) every 32 seconds.
Trend 02 — Finding the Needle
AI-powered discovery at scale
When your library exceeds thousands or hundreds of thousands of assets, search speed is the difference between a usable system and a liability.
Visual Analysis
(objects, scenes, activities)
Transcriptions
(Speech-to-text)
Total AI Jobs
Iconik’s AI engine
In 2025, over 11.4 million AI jobs transformed raw media into searchable metadata.
Facial recognition
Released in September 2025, Iconik’s facial recognition has already processed over 578,000 jobs.
Trend 03 — Automating for Velocity
Removing the manual bottleneck
At scale, manual tasks interrupt crucial workflows. Every click, every handoff, every request becomes a blocker. Automation removes the friction that slows teams down.
Jobs automated this year, from transcodes to custom API-driven workflows
Percentage of metadata updates in Iconik that are now fully automated
Trend 04 — Collaboration without borders
Shared context, not fragmented feedback
Modern media demands collaboration that removes the artificial boundary between professional playback and real-time feedback.
Comments
Assets shared
Approvals completed
Trend 05 — Moving Mountains
Storage strategy is business strategy
Hybrid cloud is an operational reality, with 71% of data in the cloud and 29% remaining on-premises for performance and security.
Archive operations to manage costs intelligently
Saved by Overtime in their first year by utilizing automated tiering
Trend 06 — The Ecosystem Effect
Integrating with minimal effort
No platform is an island. Scalable infrastructure means fitting into the tools your team already uses.
Integrations
API calls per second
API operations per day
Trend 06 — The Ecosystem Effect
9:16 is king
Data from Backlight’s live video production and clipping platform, Wildmoka, show how teams are creating and distributing content in real-time. The "social race" has shifted entirely toward mobile-first, vertical storytelling.
Growth of publishing in 9:16 format since 2024
Number of large-scale publishers that exceeded 10,000 videos produced each month in 2025
Ready to benchmark your media operation?
The media landscape will only become noisier. Success won’t come from doing more with less—it will come from building smart infrastructure that can keep pace with the explosion of content.
Download the full report to access:
