“The only upshot of the whole deal would be synergies and distribution,” mused one ex-All3Media executive of the Banijay-All3 merger when news first emerged last month.
The Reuters report revealing talks between French-headquartered behemoth Banijay and RedBird-owned production giant All3 – soon confirmed via a statement from publicly-listed Banijay – in some senses took the industry by surprise and in others felt par for the course, given that 2026 is shaping up to be a defining year for consolidation in the entertainment industry (see also: Netflix/Paramount-Warners, Sky-ITV, Mediawan-North Road).
All the chatter since points to the deal slowly progressing, with both parties keen to merge entities that would have annual revenue totaling several billion dollars, bringing together the likes of The Traitors producer Studio Lambert, Peaky Blinders indie Kudos, The Tourist maker Two Brothers and Neal Street, which is behind the upcoming quad of Beatles movies directed by Sam Mendes.
But Banijay and All3 don’t only produce content. They each have hefty distribution arms, shopping some of the biggest shows in the world, staffed by numerous salespeople and execs, who wield serious selling power.
As buyers and sellers from around the world get ready to descend on the UK capital for the London TV Screenings, many are thinking about the shape of a combined Banijay Rights–All3Media International, what this would do to the landscape and how consolidation in distribution has acted as a disruptor over the past few years. “This was inevitable, and shows the polarization of the distribution market,” says the owner of a boutique distributor. Banijay Rights and All3Media International both declined comment for this feature.
255,000-hour giant
Banijay Rights’ colossal catalog totals around 220,000 hours, while All3Media International may have a smaller arsenal of circa-35,000, but is consistently considered among the most respected sellers and holds a trump card in the shape of a certain show titled The Traitors. According to the latter’s latest annual results, the “integrated distribution model driving exploitation of IP… creating long-term value in the group” is one of the Jane Turton-led All3’s key priorities.
Formats in the freshly-merged distributor’s catalog would include MasterChef, Survivor, Lego Masters, Big Brother, Undercover Boss and Race Across the World. Analyst K7’s latest ‘Tracking the Unscripted Giants’ report crowned Banijay as the clear scale leader of them all, naming it Distributor of the Year for the third consecutive year, as it pointed to 300 active international adaptations accounting for 21% of all new format launches in 2024.
All3, while smaller in volume, was highlighted as a premium hit-maker led by The Traitors, which continues to sell at a rate of knots and has given the sales house added heft in the market. It has regularly been voted the top UK-based distributor by rivals in Broadcast magazine annual Distributors’ Survey.
With more than 250,000 hours of content to manage, a major challenge for the Banijay-All3 distributor would be keeping across its catalog in its entirety, sources believe.
“My first thought when I read about this was, ‘That will be a very big catalog – how will that poor sales team get their head around it?,” says an experienced seller who used to work for a major distributor. “The issue when you have lots of really big titles is that it becomes easy for things to drop to the bottom and harder to work the back catalog. If a mega group controls more content, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be able to sell all of it.”
The source floats that buyers and producers “want to work with lots of different distributors” and won’t take kindly to such a swelling catalog being under one roof.
Marc Lorber, a former Lionsgate executive who is now a freelance co-production supremo, agrees that producers and the people weaving the financing packages together want a proliferation of choice. “The more distributors you can go to, the more you can play them against one another,” he says. He therefore worries about the impact “less free market competition” would have on the production community’s ability to generate value for its content.
The boutique seller quoted earlier in the article is slightly less tactful. “You will get a lot of pissed off producers [if they merge],” they say. “There could be some collateral damage, where producers would look elsewhere, to someone who might look after them a bit more. Producers want a bit of a cuddle.”
While Banijay and All3 both benefit from vertical integration, as they both own reams of production companies whose shows can then be sold via their distributors, this source believes All3 has been busier buying shows from third parties than usual of late. “It didn’t used to feel like they were competing in the bear pit of third-party rights, but this past year they have been out there fattening up the calf,” they add. Recent examples have included Wonderhood Studios’ Michael Jackson: The Trial and Lightbox’s Murder at the Post Office, both of which are being shopped at the London TV Screenings.
Benefit of scale
Whatever the situation with third-party rights, there is no doubt that a combined Banijay-All3 seller would benefit from scale advantages. K7’s report suggests a merger would concentrate distribution power across the full format lifecycle, from origination and international rollout to long-term renewal.
“With more content, you can diversify risk and make bolder decisions,” says the experienced sales source. “You can also develop strategic partnerships with channels, broadcasters and streamers. If the big distributors are able to strike these partnerships and volume deals then you may squeeze out the smaller companies who are left with no one to sell to.”
Such partnerships have become a feature of today’s more vertically-integrated landscape, with distributor deficits becoming a more crucial slice of a TV show’s financing pie as networks struggle with the costs of programing. Guy Bisson, an Executive Director at Ampere Analysis, says more and more networks have preferred dealing with larger, scaled players since the “era of peak TV came to a crashing end” around the time of the 2023 U.S. labor strikes. “When times are challenged, you want security in your partner, and scale brings that,” he adds.
Bisson is in fact giving a talk at the Berlinale this week where his central theme centers on a prediction that global spend on original content will remain flat over the next few years while content licensing rises, which plays into the hands of a scaled distribution player selling back catalog that includes numerous franchises.
While the pair have synergies galore and operate in a similar pool, Bisson says Banijay and All3 will be looking to achieve what he terms “diagonal integration,” where two companies merge and one is able to benefit from the other’s capabilities. For instance, Banijay has a live-events offering and All3 has owned prolific digital studio Little Dot for more than a decade.
Mark Browning, the boss of Rob & Rylan’s Passage to India studio Zinc Media Group, is all for this form of diagonal integration. Zinc recently launched a distribution arm, meaning Banijay Rights and All3Media International are technically rivals, yet for Browning a rising tide lifts all boats and the sector should “radically consolidate its offering” as a means for bringing in more outside investment.
“In terms of ownership, the industry hasn’t reinvented itself for years and I think we are starting to see the consequences, which is harder economic times,” he adds. “Investors have fallen out of love with [distribution] as a vehicle for investing.”
Far from believing job losses would be a consequence of the merger, Browning thinks in the longer term the deal would create more posts as outside investment floods in. “If we grow, there will by definition be more jobs available,” he says.
Some will disagree. Synergies have been at the center of discussions around a combined Banijay-All3, and with synergies comes layoffs. Many of those we speak with for this article believe this will extend to the two distribution divisions, with an American sales exec who works in Europe pointing to how things have changed at All3 since RedBird completed its £1.15B ($1.57B) takeover in 2024. “Someone comes in and says, ‘Can you justify this? Do we need this many people, or this many shows?’,” they say.
There is a likelihood that distribution bosses Cathy Payne and Louise Pedersen, both well-liked execs who have been in post more than a decade apiece (Before it was snaffled by Banijay, Payne previously ran distribution at Endemol Shine Group, so has merger experience), will therefore be battling it out for one top sales job. Given Banijay’s relative size, Payne was deemed by two of our sources to just about have the edge. “It’s inevitable that one of them goes,” says the American sales exec. “Look at Disney – they thought about co-CEOs, but they knew it wouldn’t work.”
Squeezed middle
A Banijay-All3 sales arm would be tucked away safely up one end of what has become a polarized distributor landscape over the past few years in terms of size, in what many now deem a landsacpe defined by a squeezed middle.
Beyond a handful of players like Canada’s Cineflix and Blue Ant, which just took over a majority of compatriot Boat Rocker’s assets, it now feels as though the market is mostly dominated by giants and boutiques, the latter being the companies willing to give producers that “cuddle” our source described. “There is big, there is little, and there is nothing in between,” adds the boutique seller. “It’s dangerous to be mid-sized these days.”
Bisson says the middle is now a “grey area” of just a few companies who are “not big enough to be of interest to a large entity,” but “too big” to be considered a smaller, specialized entity. “With intense shifts in terms of licensing content, the ever tighter control of IP and a desire from streamers to own their own rights and become mega studios, those in the middle are left in a strange position,” he considers.
However, one exec, who works for a mid-sized player, pushes back firmly on the notion that the middle is dying out. “There is a decent argument to say that you will get the best service from a mid-sized distributor,” he adds. “They have the relevant scale, but know what happens on the ground floor.”
Keeping abreast of activity “on the ground floor” will be crucial to the sales teams out there hustling day by day if this deal does indeed go through. The ink is by no means dry, but consolidation is clearly on the mind of all and sundry working across the distribution landscape. Were this to complete, the ripple effects would be felt in all corners.
