What do you do if you’re sitting on hundreds of unscripted TV formats that are waiting for their revivals to come? If you’re Banijay, you team up with YouTube to ride the wave of creator game shows.
At the MIPCOM conference in Cannes, Banijay announced the establishment of an Entertainment Creators Lab that will pair French YouTube stars with dormant IP. The multinational media company will reach across its vast portfolio — which includes more than 130 production studios across 23 territories — to select the formats that are ready to be turned into digital-native spinoffs.
Familiar TV favorites owned by Banijay include MasterChef, Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, and Survivor. The Paris-based company is kicking off its Entertainment Creators Lab in its home country by reimagining game shows like Minute to Win It (picutred above) and local favorites like Première Compagnie.
The chosen creators will each receive €50,000 to kickstart the development of their pilots.”For us, it’s an opportunity to test, to launch, and maybe to scale up in the future some of our dormant IP, because we have a huge dormant catalog of formats, or maybe to launch a new show,” Banijay CEO Marco Bassetti told Variety at MIPCOM.
Since the start of 2025, Banijay has been accelerating its work on what Basseti has dubbed
“digital transformation efforts.” One property that has already received a digital shake-up is MasterChef; a creator-led take on the franchise premiered in Brazil earlier this year.That initiative looks to tap into the energy generated by the creators who have developed and presented their own game shows. Entertainment rights holders have turned that passion into a new distribution window, leading to collaborations like the Sidemen x FremantleMedia team-up that resulted in a YouTube version of Supermarket Sweep.
Unscripted creator programming is particularly big in France, where the streamer Squeezie recently completed an epic racecar rally that drew more than 1.4 million viewers on Twitch. One of the biggest stars on the French version of YouTube is Inoxtag, who turned his quest to climb Mount Everest into a documentary that raked in seven figures at the box office.
Banijay France CEO Alexia Laroche-Joubert believes her company can engage with those creator fanbases through a program that will “reinvent our emblematic brands” for “digital universes.” That kind of reinvention is happening all over the globe, so there’s room for Banijay to make deals (or no deals) with a multinational cohort of creator partners.
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