Introduction

Banijay, formerly Endemol Shine UK, is the world’s largest independent producer, with 120 production labels spanning 22 different markets. Its brands include major television shows, such as Big Brother, Peaky Blinders, Black Mirror and MasterChef, in addition to online sensations like Mr Bean and Simon’s Cat, totalling over three billion monthly views across its entire portfolio of content.

In the UK business alone, Banijay manages 27 different brands, all working on multiple productions, resulting in an enormous volume of daily rushes and other production content that needs to be shared with multiple departments.

 With such a high volume of commercially-sensitive content, Banijay was faced with severe challenges when it came to secure, coordinated distribution of assets to a highly fragmented group of production companies spread across Spain, France, the USA and Australia.

With the potential for asset leaks resulting in serious and costly legal and reputational damage, Banijay needed to solve their production management challenges with a simple solution, centred around secure, carefully-managed control of all their assets.

The opportunity

Banijay needed a single, central repository that the entire organisation could adopt without lengthy or complex training and transition processes. While they key stakeholders were the production and executive teams, Banijay also needed a way to allow other departments, such as legal, logging and medical teams, to also access content.

More importantly, Banijay needed a solution that was secure and had granular, manageable access permissions. Previously, assets were shared using Vimeo and WeTransfer, which provided no security or audit trail, and no control over who might receive or forward on links to sensitive assets.

GDPR compliance was another vital concern. For example, for productions that show members of the public, such as Big Brother, it was important for the legal teams to have a clear audit trail of where the content had been and where it came from, so that any data access requests from individuals could be handled promptly and in a complaint manner.

With a maximum fine for GDPR violations of up to 20 million euros, or up to 4% of total global turnover, ensuring Banijay’s asset control system was compliant was a crucial requirement.

The solution

Imagen’s premium content management and delivery platform has been able to solve Banijay's key challenges, allowing departments to organise their content and streamline their production operations.

Production teams in all locations are now able to upload daily rushes, picture logs and cuts, simplifying the process of review and approval. The flexibility of the platform has also provided other production benefits, such as allowing for the uploading of Rowan Atkinson’s speech tests during the recording of Mr Bean.

 Importantly, the Imagen platform has also solved key issues relating to security and GDPR. Groups were created for each department, and group-level and individual permissions provide controlled access to sensitive content.

With a secure, central repository for the whole organisation, Banijay can now effectively control and monitor who is accessing content and what they are doing with it. This reduces the possibility of content being leaked, and also provides clear evidence of responsibility, which acts as an effective deterrent against the potential misuse of assets. Plus, with a clear audit trail, the legal team is able to manage requests under GPDR and ensure the organisation remains compliant.

“The Imagen platform has allowed us to enact a cultural shift within the organisation,” said Stewart Carter, Digital Asset Manager of Banijay. “Now, instead of insecure, fragmented and chaotic management of sensitive assets, we have a single, intuitive platform that has solved our production control challenges.”

The Imagen platform also provides additional benefits, beyond its core functions – for example acting as a vehicle for distributing marketing content. Because there is continuity of the platform across the organisation, marketing teams can use Imagen to provide access to screeners for a worldwide marketplace. This allows Banijay to not only streamline and secure its production process, but to drive additional revenues too.

Key Features

• Simple and intuitive
• Audit trails for GDPR compliance
• Group and individual access permissions
• Prevents unauthorised leaks
• Simplifies reviewing daily rushes
• Commenting and collaboration
• Useful marketing tool

"Imagen provides a glossy, fully-searchable and easy to use system."

Mark Cotterel, Head of IT, Banijay