Banijay Entertainment supercharges creativity with Base Media Cloud and Amazon Web Services

As audiences around the world watch and engage with content in new ways, Banijay Entertainment wants to ensure it remains nimble and responsive to new opportunities. With this in mind, the content powerhouse is undertaking a digital transformation with the help of Base Media Cloud (base) and Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services). The aim is to streamline how the studio creates, distributes, and monetizes content across the globe.

As one of the largest European studios for production, distribution, and live experiences and events, Banijay Entertainment has over 130 production companies across 23 territories. The studio also boasts an expansive intellectual property (IP) offering of more than 205 thousand hours of content. Its multi-disciplinary, multi-genre portfolio spans linear and streaming, social media, branded entertainment, sports, and live experiences and events. Big Brother, MasterChef, Peaky Blinders, Marie Antoinette, and Rogue Heroes represent a few of the studio’s hit titles.

Peaky Blinders image courtesy of Banijay Entertainment.

Together, Banijay Entertainment, base, and Amazon Web Services will centralize over 200,000 hours of its IP within an Amazon Web Services and AI-powered content hub as part of the transformation. “The content industry has undergone seismic shifts, and as the proliferation of platforms endures, and audiences continue to shift habits, we too must shift,” noted Cédric Brignon, Chief Finance and Transformation Officer, Banijay Entertainment. “As a global content powerhouse, we must protect what we’ve built. It’s why digital transformation is key to our future, and we’re embarking on this journey with Amazon Web Services and base.”

“Although Banijay Rights has a longstanding relationship with Amazon Web Services, we’re now scaling our ambitions at a central level to enhance operational efficiency and talent creativity, and drive innovation, within the group and across the industry at-large. This agreement is a crucial first step, and we look forward to the new opportunities and revenue streams that lie ahead,” he added.

As the collaboration kicks off, Banijay Entertainment has identified key areas where new cloud-based technology can drive meaningful improvements. These enhancements range from more effective in-house operations, from production through post, to leveraging generative AI and machine learning (ML) to reduce time to market. The company is also looking to expand its distribution capabilities to directly reach more devices and platforms.

“Amazon Web Services and base are incredible partners to help us address all the challenges we face in this transformation,” explained Damien Viel, Banijay Entertainment’s Chief Digital and Innovation Officer. “They’ve inspired us to rethink, imagine, and design a blueprint to ensure supply chain and distribution success using a combination of cloud, AI, and data-driven solutions.”

Taking flight: From ground to cloud

As a first step in its multi-phase transformation, Banijay Entertainment is moving previously decentralized on-premises operations into the cloud, establishing a truly global operation to advance its business. This involves building a common tech stack for logistics, media supply chain, and storage while moving its labels and content to the cloud. With Banijay Rights, Banijay Entertainment’s distribution arm, the team has already implemented cloud-based tools to gain new efficiencies and digitized nearly 10 petabytes of content on Amazon Web Services. Its goal is to multiply that by 10 in the next three years.

With numerous storage formats and associated technologies in use across Banijay Entertainment, Amazon Web Services and base formed a smart ingest strategy to support several formats. This approach included direct ingest of digital content onto the cloud (mass migration services such as Amazon Snowball), cloud-to-cloud migration, and localized tape ingest. Ingest is carefully orchestrated through Iconik by Backlight’s Media Asset Management system, ensuring metadata continuity across the asset lifecycle. Base and Amazon Web Services also developed a tiered storage strategy using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon S3 Glacier to provide appropriate access across a variety of use cases.

“Although Banijay Rights has already worked with Amazon Web Services for a decade, we want to increase the percentage of digitized content we have on the cloud to ensure a homogeneous digital content upload process across countries; it’s a key KPI this year,” Damien noted. “The Amazon Web Services team will be instrumental to achieving this goal. They’re helping us get a fresh and accurate vision of how we should operate with concrete support that’s invaluable.”

In the meantime, Banijay Entertainment is working to move all post-production operations to the cloud, leaning on Amazon Web Services and creative tools partners like Adobe to build a secure and compliant foundation to support this pivot. Further down the line, they plan to leverage the cloud to explore new business opportunities and set goals for enhancing commercialization and monetization efforts.

Laying the groundwork for direct-to-consumer

Monetization is a continuing focus for Banijay Entertainment throughout the ongoing transformation. Damien and team are now evaluating how they can employ direct-to-consumer (D2C) and social media to gain more ownership over the entire content life cycle. They see Amazon Web Services infrastructure playing a key role, making it seamless for them to innovate more rapidly and diversify in new ways.

“Though we’ll continue to work with broadcasters and streamers, we’re always thinking about what’s next, and that’s D2C. We strongly believe we could market more across social channels to empower our IP and engage with fans directly,” Damien explained. “This is why our partnership with Amazon Web Services is so important; it better positions us to anticipate the future and ensure that we’ll be able to tackle all these challenges to maintain our market position.”

Exploring new possibilities with AI

Working closely with Amazon Web Services, Damien, Cédric, and their teams are also establishing a vision for how generative AI might fit into the larger business. Banijay Entertainment’s infrastructure already leverages AI/ML-powered metadata management and indexing to enhance content discovery and licensing, but generative AI presents new opportunities.

To this end, Damien’s team is testing generative AI applications to support lip sync translation, scripting, imagery creation, and more across both post-production and distribution. With the help of generative AI services, Banijay Entertainment will be able to search its full cloud-based content hub quickly, access any clip, and provide translations faster than ever. That content can then be distributed and monetized in new areas, unlocking new growth opportunities.

“Amazon Web Services is the biggest and strongest cloud partner on the market,” said Damien. “Combining its technologies with base’s integration expertise and AI innovation, we can work to globalize all the content available in our library. We’ll be able to search for a show that we can clip, translate, and monetize in 30 countries, which will be a real game-changer in terms of scaling our content.”

Marching toward the future

Banijay Entertainment’s global Amazon Web Services deployment with base is just getting underway, but the transformation is setting the stage for a future that will solidify Banijay Entertainment’s position as a market leader in entertainment. The new cloud-based infrastructure will propel fresh growth across Banijay Entertainment’s existing content channels and emerging platforms. It will also introduce unparalleled savings, productivity, and innovation gains that will unlock new monetization opportunities.

Damien concluded, “The global nature of Amazon Web Services, its high level of security and compliance, and its strong network of partnerships are paramount to Banijay Entertainment, making Amazon Web Services an ideal partner. Its strength and position in the entertainment business are incredible, and they have all the qualifications and knowledge base to support a future cloud infrastructure that is secure, safe, and efficient. They also connect us to innovative people, entrepreneurs, and partner technologies that boost our innovation strategies. We couldn’t imagine a better partner to embark on this journey with.”

Uncover the power of Amazon Web Services in streamlining content production and distribution and reach out to an Amazon Web Services for Media & Entertainment (M&E) representative to learn more.