Snips Partners With Banijay Rights and BIG Media to Turn Library Titles Into Short-Form, Vertical Episodes (EXCLUSIVE)
Digital startup Snips — which mines TV and film libraries to turn existing content into short-form, vertical (or “microseries”) fare — has sealed new deals with Banijay Rights and BIG Media to adapt some of their series and movies into minute-long episodes.
Banijay Rights is the global distribution arm of Banijay Entertainment (“Big Brother,” “MasterChef”), while BIG Media is an unscripted producer (“Inside the CIA: Secrets & Spies,” “Truthseekers”).
Titles that will be adapted into vertical microseries under this deal include “The Fall” (starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan), “Flowers” (starring Olivia Colman and Julian Barratt), “Gracepoint” (starring David Tennant), “Gunpowder” (starring Kit Harington), “Humans” (starring Gemma Chan and Colin Morgan), “MasterChef,” “Merlin” (starring Colin Morgan and Bradley James) and “Two Weeks to Live.”
This reps the first major content deals for Snips. The company said it will announce additional content partners in the months to come. The company currently has more than 1,000 titles available, with a goal toward producing “dozens” per week and “thousands of titles” per year.
In the case of these TV series and films, Snips will edit them down (utilizing AI via its own proprietary program) into around 60 micro-episodes per title. Those episodes will last between 45 seconds and two minutes and feature much of the same storyline — but edited down, with each episode ending on some sort of cliffhanger.
Banijay and BIG Media retain ownership of the series IP, and Snips will share revenue (which comes from users on Snips’ vertical platform) with those distribution partners.
“Entertainment has moved from the theater, to the television, to the phone — and studios have some of the most valuable stories ever told sitting in their libraries, just waiting for a format built for how mobile audiences actually watch,” said Snips co-founder/CEO Or Ben Shimon in a statement. “Snips exists to unlock that opportunity — to give people the stories they already love, one snip at a time, where and how they want it.”
Snips said it will work closely with Banijay and BIG Media “to test and learn in the short-form, vertical-first space, helping both parties understand what resonates with mobile audiences and how established catalog content can perform in this emerging format” and that further titles will be selected “by mutual agreement.”
Said Banijay Rights digital VP Shaun Keeble: “Snips has the ability to get technology behind this: a platform that can bring a catalog of our scale to mobile audiences quickly, market each title intelligently, and give us title-by-title transparency on how our content performs.” Added BIG Media president/co-founder Danny Wilk: “We have been producing originals for seventeen years, and have hundreds of unscripted and reality titles that can be part of the growing new vertical space to expand our reach to mobile audiences … It’s a new revenue line from content we already own, and the title-by-title data means we can see exactly what’s working as we go.”
As the vertical/microseries space grows, most new entrants have focused on producing original content, but Snips said that it “deliberately does not create its own content. Producing originals would put it in competition with the very studios it depends on. Studios remain the storytellers, and Snips remains the platform that carries their work to mobile.”