Oct 17, 2025
Summary
A regional sports rights distributor turned archival footage into $250,000+ in year one by partnering with Protege to license to generative AI companies, while maintaining IP protections.
After seeing traction with its initial upload of sports content to the Protege platform, the distributor uploaded additional footage to meet the demand of enterprise AI buyers.
Rather than simply holding and incurring storage costs for their high-quality archival footage across sporting events, highlight reels, and sports field settings, the distributor was able to monetize the content for multiple deals and counting.
Introduction: Earning in the Offseason
Traditionally in sports media, last year’s games have little commercial value for this year. Fans and leagues want the latest match, star moments, and hype highlights; only a small percentage of content actually gets used or referenced after it is first shot.
Yet for AI model builders, this older footage — especially high-quality, multi-angle content with human movement, close-up shots, and real-world physics — is a golden content opportunity.
After hearing about Protege through their media industry network, a sports league rights distributor converted its unused archival video library into a new revenue stream. After uploading thousands of hours of content to the Protege platform, Protege secured multiple enterprise-scale licensing deals that included their catalog as a part of larger content packages in aggregate.
This landed the distributor $250,000+ in net-new revenue in a matter of months — all without touching current rights, broadcast, or licensing commitments.
Getting off the Bench
Like most sports rights holders, the distributor had a significant amount of high-quality content from the past 10 years, but not at the hundreds of thousands of hour volumes that the largest AI builders have routinely requested. As a result, going directly to AI companies was not realistic, and required sales and data engineering resources that were not readily available for the distributor.
This created a natural fit with Protege. By aggregating other sports content, Protege could put together a ready-made package for AI training and secure the largest possible deals across multiple customers.
Initially, the distributor provided a few thousand hours of high-quality sports from its catalog, but tripled that initial upload volume when demand became clear over time.
While their content was included with that of other providers in the Protege partner network, the distributor maintained protection of its IP thanks to innovative license agreements. With decades of deep media expertise (Warner Bros., Paramount, Fox, Universal, A&E, and others), the Protege Media team pioneered key legal protections for AI content licensing that have become the standard for the industry.
“By being advocates for our partners, we’re able to show them more value in the long run,” said Xenia Shevnina, Protege’s Head of EMEA Licensing. ”We’re here to really be good stewards for them and for their content.”
The Protege Process
From initial data discussions to delivery to royalty payment, the Protege media team kept the distributor in the loop.
Data Discovery: Protege evaluated the library for AI readiness and key criteria: native HD (not up-scaled), production recency, camera stability, and sustained human movement along with multi-angle action.
Clear Licensing: The parties signed a clean revenue-share agreement covering any Protege deals that included the distributor’s content. The distributor retained visibility throughout negotiations.
Content Aggregation. Because most enterprise requests span genres and partners, Protege bundled the distributor’s sports segments into diverse packages that met buyer thresholds. This unlocked access to top AI buyers that would not engage with a smaller content provider on a one-off basis.
Buyer-specific Curation. Requested samples from potential buyers varied—from broad, multi-genre training sets to clips emphasizing people and objects in motion. The Protege team designed specific workflows to extract relevant “clips” from the distributor’s content, providing an additional layer of curation that resulted in more premium pricing.
Delivery & Quick Settlement. Once the buyers paid, Protege remitted the royalties to the distributor faster than contractual requirements to reinforce trust and long-term alignment for future deals.
Opportunities from Multiple Camera Angles
For some Protege partners, there are immediate buyers lining up to buy a set content package. In this case, however, it took a few months for deals to materialize and match their current data needs to what the distributor had to offer. But once it did match, the demand came quickly.
To illustrate, two of the deals in which the distributor was included were quite different:
Tens of thousands of hours of broad footage, including sporting events and general sports environments
Thousands of hours of human movement and human-object interactions (ie. foot kicking ball)
Despite these differences, the same single library provided by the distributor served multiple use cases — and ultimately, multiple deals. This underscores how AI buyers are constantly searching for the right types of content for their AI models; and that repeat revenue opportunities are common.
The bottom line: what was previously worth little in the eyes of the company now had new life — this time as anonymized training data used to help train the next generation of AI models. Beyond the successful first year working with Protege, the same distributor has other opportunities in the pipeline for the upcoming year.
Become a Protege Partner and Unlock New Revenue
For content rights holders like this sports rights distributor, there are a few key differentiators in working with Protege:
Proven Media Rights Knowledge & Background: Media and entertainment industry leadership, specifically around ethically licensing content and data for AI
AI Data Expertise: Deep, research-backed knowledge of data for AI-specific use cases and close partnerships with researchers working at the largest AI companies in the world
Transparent Agreements: Licensing terms that provide IP protections combined with clear payment terms
Protege delivered on all of the above to unlock significant new revenue that was meaningful for the sports rights holder’s book of business.
Interested in unlocking new opportunities for your organization through content licensing for AI? Contact the Protege Media team at media@withprotege.ai.