Oct 8, 2025
Summary
A major EMEA-based broadcaster earned over $1M in 6 months by licensing its scripted and cinematic library with Protege, the leader in ethically licensing AI training data.
Protege aggregates media content across rights holders, maintaining licensing protections while unlocking new opportunities.
Thanks to its high-quality library, the broadcaster’s content has been included in multiple completed deals with leading AI companies, with more opportunities under discussion.
Introduction: In Search of Lost Revenue
A national broadcaster was searching for new, durable revenue as several legacy channels plateaued. Their broad catalog—decades of premium TV drama, entertainment formats, news, sports clips, and ambient footage—was valuable, but had additional potential in the age of AI.
By partnering with Protege, the broadcaster converted their high-quality library into a new licensing income stream that quickly became a new revenue source—crossing $1M+ USD in the first six months of partnership.
“This broadcaster was sitting on a vast trove of high-quality content, and trusted Protege to unlock new value,” explained Protege’s Chief Content Officer and Hollywood veteran Dave Davis. “Aggregating premium catalogs into AI buyer-ready packages is what unlocks the big opportunities.”
Untapped Potential
The broadcaster had tested the AI licensing waters before. However, the largest AI companies—who currently make up the majority of revenue opportunities in the licensing space—were starting to require volumes of content that even a national player could not fulfill. Bespoke deals with individual AI companies were also difficult to navigate, while also requiring data engineering and business development time.
At the same time, the broadcaster knew that their content had immense value: tens of thousands of hours of high-quality and metadata-rich video content across scripted TV series, news, variety shows, sports, ambient landscapes, and b-roll. But all that sat in storage, incurring hosting costs.
Converting Content into Revenue with Protege
Enter Protege.
Protege helps content holders like this broadcaster monetize their catalog for AI training use. Thanks to decades of media expertise (Warner, Paramount, Fox, A&E, Universal) and pioneering key legal protections for AI content licensing (Dataset Providers Alliance, Copyright Society AI subcommittee), the Protege media team was in the perfect position to help the broadcaster with their goal.
“This broadcaster had a fairly sophisticated understanding of AI licensing opportunities. It was great validation for Protege that they trusted us to sub-license their content to AI companies,” said Davis. “We included their high quality content alongside content from dozens of other partners from around the world, and the resulting diversity-rich package helped drive two major deals.”
The Protege Process
Here’s the step-by-step process for how Protege unlocked $1M+ in revenue within 6 months:
Data Discovery: Protege evaluated the broadcaster’s data for quality and metadata richness. Both are key considerations for all model builders, who only accept high-quality data that meet certain specifications. For example, native 1080p, recent productions, and visually rich scenes with movement are coveted by AI companies, in contrast to lower resolution content, or content with a shaky camera or poor lighting with lower demand.
Licensing & Data Delivery: Protege and the broadcaster agreed to a standard revenue-share agreement based on any future licensing deals that Protege signed that used the broadcaster’s data or a subset of the data. All throughout negotiations with the AI buyers, Protege maintained good transparency, advising the broadcaster on the negotiations and accepting feedback and advice.
Because Protege hosts its content on a secure major cloud provider, data uploading from the broadcaster to the Protege platform was straightforward. This initial transfer also ensured that future requests from potential deals could be scoped out and sold quickly, without the need for repeated data transfers.
Data Aggregation & Deal Access: Protege packaged the broadcaster’s catalog to live on the Protege platform alongside other vetted Protege partners, creating diversified supply that matched large-scale AI training and evaluation requests. This “one-contract, many-catalogs” approach opened doors to large enterprise AI buyers that require broad scale and diversity.
Deal-specific curation: Every prospective AI buyer has different data needs. Most requests require content from multiple catalogs across multiple partners. Working directly with AI company researchers to refine their requests, Protege curated the right combination of data sources that included a significant portion of the broadcaster’s content.
Deal-negotiation: The first two deals that included the broadcaster’s content were some of the first aggregated AI licenses in history. As part of these deals, Protege’s experienced team innovated legal protections around rights of publicity, music licensing, protection of rights to derivative works and much more. And by maintaining exclusive AI training rights for the broadcaster’s catalog, Protege was able to ensure that it could maximize the price because AI buyers were not able to negotiate with multiple parties for the exact same catalog.
Revenue Recognition: Within weeks of signing with Protege, the broadcaster’s content was being discussed in multiple sales conversations. Within six months, Protege closed multiple enterprise licensing deals with marquee AI companies, unlocking seven-figures of net new licensing revenue.
When each of the AI buyers paid, Protege paid out royalties ahead of schedule.
An Ongoing Partnership
Today, Protege’s sales pipeline is stronger than ever. Additional passive revenue opportunities for the broadcaster are almost inevitable, all using the same body of content provided initially.
Whether the content-holder is a national broadcaster, a sports league, a film studio, or UGC creator, there are a few key considerations that are important to keep in mind about Protege:
Deep expertise in the media and entertainment industry, and leadership in ethically licensing content and data for AI
Deep technical expertise with AI training data
Clear licensing terms that provide IP protections
In working with the broadcaster, Protege leveraged all of the above to unlock new, incremental revenue — all in a short period of time.
The Protege Advantage
Protege launched initially by providing anonymized healthcare data to AI companies. This may seem irrelevant for media licenses, but that is far from the truth.
As a leader in the AI healthcare data space, Protege earns unique credibility with AI companies, who then want to find additional ways to work with Protege. This has led directly to several large deals beyond healthcare, including one of the deals for the broadcaster. As Protege expands further into audio, motion capture and beyond, this unmatched cross-pollination will continue.
Become a Protege Partner and Unlock New Revenue
To learn more about how your organization can unlock new revenue by ethically licensing your content for AI, contact the Protege team at contact@withprotege.ai.
You can also meet the team in October at MIPCOM 2025 in Cannes, where Protege Chief Content Officer Dave Davis will be speaking on the AI Licensing, Rights, & Revenues Panel.
