Content’s new colossus: why the Banijay-All3Media merger rewires the game for streamers, staffers and India

MUMBAI: The Casino Builder. The Endgame Player. If ever there were sobriquets waiting to be pinned on Stéphane Courbit, these are the two. Because follow the money, dear reader, always follow the money, and the Banijay-All3Media merger stops being a press release and starts becoming a rather delicious story.

On 9 July, the world’s largest independent production company came into being. An $8 billion behemoth called Banijay Entertainment. Headquartered in London. Straddling 25 territories. Some 170-odd labels. A catalogue of 265,000 hours, enough television to keep you glued to the screen for the next 30 years without repeating an episode, in case you were wondering.

Strip away the champagne copy about “creative powerhouses,” though, and what do you find? A cold, dazzling piece of financial jugglery. Courbit’s Banijay Group walked away with a cash upstream of €801 million, €625 million paid by RedBird IMI plus a €176 million pre-closing dividend, while shareholders pocket a sweetener of €0.93 a share later this month.

Translation for those of us watching from Lower Parel: the Frenchman sold half his content empire for the price of the whole street, kept his hands firmly on the steering wheel, and got Abu Dhabi and Wall Street to bankroll his next land grab. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how the big boys play.

A takeover in a wedding sherwani

Let us call it what it is. Never mind the “merger of equals” mithai being distributed. This is Banijay swallowing All3Media whole, the combined entity carries Banijay’s name, Banijay’s chief executive Marco Bassetti, Banijay’s decentralised country-CEO model, and Banijay Group consolidates the earnings. All3Media, founded in 2003 by former ITV executives fleeing an earlier round of consolidation; savour that irony over your evening chai, ceases to exist as a brand after 23 years. Jane Turton, who ran it with a famously light federal touch, becomes deputy chief executive of merged entity. Jeff Zucker, the ex-CNN boss steering RedBird IMI, the vehicle backed by Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi-based IMI, takes the chairman’s seat.

Now here’s the question every consolidation-watcher should ask: why did this deal get done when a dozen mooted super-indie combinations died on the table like so many failed pilot episodes?

Simple. Shareholding arithmetic. Banijay Group is 45 per cent owned by Courbit’s LOV Group, with Vivendi holding close to 20 per cent; the free float is a piffling 12 per cent. Two men in a room can say yes. Contrast that with poor ITV, which held exclusive talks to buy All3Media barely a year ago and also flirted with Banijay, courtships strangled by a dispersed shareholder register and the political baggage of being a public service broadcaster. Zucker himself has confirmed Courbit came knocking in 2024, just eight weeks after RedBird IMI paid £1.15 billion for All3Media. The courtship took two years. The logic took two minutes.

The elephant in the green room (and it’s carrying debt)

Now for the bit the celebratory releases skate over faster than a saas-bahu plot twist.

All3Media brings along a debt pile of roughly £878 million. Banijay Group’s net debt stood at €2.57 billion, with leverage at 2.7x at the end of 2025 and expected at around 3x post-transaction by end-2026. When one persistent analyst asked on the investor call whether the debt would be brought down, Banijay’s chief financial officer pointed, a touch impatiently, one hears, to cost-cutting and “strong cash generation.”

Read those tea leaves, dear reader. A 3x-levered content house that has just extracted €800 million in cash for its parent, a parent which, let us not forget, also recently bought gambling group Tipico and already owns Betclic, has to sweat its assets like a Mumbai local in May.

The promised €50 million in synergies, due within 12 months of closing, will not come from cancelling the office biscuits. Distribution is the first casualty zone: Cathy Payne’s Banijay Rights (220,000 hours) and Louise Pedersen’s All3Media International (30,000-plus hours) are being collapsed into a single entity under the Banijay Rights name, with management decisions “to be taken later.”

One of television’s two most respected saleswomen is playing musical chairs with a single seat. Corporate functions, finance, regional back offices, the axe hovers. Inside All3Media, the mood is raw: staffers speak of “mega anxiety,” label bosses of sadness at losing a distinct, gentler culture. Town halls and reassurances about “protecting creatives” followed within hours, which tells you the anxiety was real enough to need managing.

The counter-argument, and give it its due: Bassetti has publicly committed to no label closures, and insists the €50 million goes back into development. His track record with Endemol Shine, bought in the teeth of the pandemic, integrated without gutting the creative front line, earns him the benefit of the doubt. But integration fatigue is cumulative. This is Banijay’s third mega-digestion (Zodiak, Endemol Shine, now All3Media), and each round leaves scar tissue. Ask anyone who has survived three mergers; the smile gets a little tighter each time.

What the streamers just lost

Here is the strategic heart of the deal, stated baldly by Banijay Group chief executive François Riahi himself: size matters, and in the age of artificial intelligence, owning and exploiting IP matters even more.

Consider the timing. The merger landed days after Paramount Skydance pipped Netflix to Warner Bros Discovery, weeks after the Sky-ITV deal redrew British broadcasting. The buy side of television is consolidating into four or five global gatekeepers. The sell side has just answered in kind. Tit for tat, as they say.

For Netflix, Amazon and Disney, the arithmetic has shifted. Through the 2023-25 commissioning drought, the streamers enjoyed a buyer’s market: dozens of hungry indies undercutting each other, IP surrendered as the price of a greenlight. Banijay Entertainment now controls so much proven format IP, Big Brother remade in over 60 countries, Survivor, MasterChef, The Traitors, Deal or No Deal, that no unscripted slate anywhere on the planet can be built without passing through its doors.

And here is a truth this writer has repeated at every summit worth its lanyard: formats are the closest thing television has to compounding assets. Pre-sold audiences. Decades of iteration data. Near-zero development risk. When one supplier owns the format oligopoly, the conversation moves from “what will you pay?” to “what will you concede?” Expect the new Banijay to push harder on IP retention, back-end participation, multi-territory bundling, and, the real prize, direct-to-consumer exploitation via FAST channels and Little Dot Studios’ digital machinery, quietly cutting the streamers out of chunks of the value chain altogether.

The streamers’ counter-move writes itself: diversify the supply lines. Fremantle, ITV Studios, Sony Pictures Television and a long tail of boutiques are about to find commissioners suddenly, suspiciously friendly. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks.

The India equation: JioStar’s golden handcuffs

Nowhere is the concentration risk more vivid than in our own backyard.

Deepak Dhar’s twin engines, Banijay Asia (his 50:50 joint venture with the group) and EndemolShine India, are the beating heart of Indian non-fiction. Bigg Boss now runs in seven languages for JioStar, the newest being Bigg Boss Bangla on Star Jalsha with Sourav Ganguly, Dada himself, as host; the Hindi edition’s last season was the most-watched non-fiction show on OTT in its finale week. Add MasterChef India, The Fifty on JioHotstar and Colors, plus a fat scripted-and-unscripted slate for Netflix India and Prime Video, and the picture is stark: India’s two biggest content buyers are structurally dependent on one supplier for their marquee reality tentpoles. On top of that, is its scripted slate with the recently released hit crime thriller Raakh and the earlier successful series The Night Manager. And then there are several others currently being adapted or being developed by its creative factory.

Post-merger, that dependence only deepens. Dhar now gets the keys to All3Media’s format cupboard, Race Across the World, Gogglebox, the Traitors machinery via Studio Lambert’s playbook, to adapt for a market of 600 million-plus streaming users where regional languages already command 61 per cent of consumption. Remember: the content revolution is happening in Tirunelveli, Ranchi and Bhagalpur, not Bandra. The Traitors has already proven itself on Prime Video India; expect regional-language versions, a Gogglebox desi avatar, and live-experience spinoffs through Banijay Live’s expertise. Bigg Boss, The Arena Tour is no longer a punchline, it is a business plan.

For JioStar, locked in a bruising subscriber war, guaranteed access to the world’s best format library is a blessing. But blessings priced by a studio with a strong production slate have a way of becoming rent. Licence fees for the Bigg Boss franchise, already reportedly among the costliest and by far the most successful properties on television and OTT, now sit on the other side of a much, much bigger negotiating table. JioStar and Netflix India will hedge, naturally: expect fresh love for Fremantle India, Sony’s production arm, and home-grown studios hungry for their break.

And there is a subtler shift, one every producer in Andheri and Aram Nagar should note. Indian producers have long griped, over cutting chai and conference panels alike, about the cost-plus commissioning model that caps margins at 10-15 per cent while the platforms keep the IP. Banijay Entertainment’s global stance, own the IP, licence the show, exploit it across every window, is the opposite philosophy. If the giant forces that model into India’s negotiating rooms, every independent producer in Mumbai benefits from the precedent. The elephant, for once, may clear the path for the ants. Wouldn’t that be something?

The Abu Dhabi asterisk

One more thread worth pulling before we roll credits. Half of the world’s largest independent producer is now owned by a vehicle backed by an Emirati royal, the same RedBird IMI whose bid for The Telegraph was blocked by the British government over foreign-state influence concerns. Production companies do not carry a newspaper’s political sensitivities, and regulators waved this deal through in four months flat. But make no mistake: soft power flows through entertainment as surely as through news. A catalogue of 265,000 hours, distribution into every market on earth, live events touching millions, that is cultural infrastructure, and its ownership now runs through Abu Dhabi and Wall Street as much as Paris and London. File that away for a rainy day.

The bottom line

The middle of the content business is dead; this deal is its headstone. What remains is a barbell: tech-media leviathans on one end, passionate boutiques on the other, and now, squarely in between, arms-dealing merrily to both, a single super-indie with the library of a studio and the leverage of a megacorp.

Bassetti’s wager is that scale funds creativity rather than smothering it. Courbit’s wager was simpler, and it has already paid out handsomely: he built the casino, sold half the table, and kept the deck.

The streamers spent a decade teaching the world that content is king. Banijay Entertainment has just reminded them of an older truth: kings don’t work for hire.