News

Creators are the new unscripted TV. Now they’re getting access to some famous formats.

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 MasterChefBig BrotherDeal 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.

Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories

Subscribe

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.

Share
Published by
Sam Gutelle

Recent Posts

As Bluesky adds more videos, YouTube adds more Bluesky-style custom feeds

YouTube is factoring user preferences into its video recommendations. Earlier this year, the video hub launched…

6 hours ago

As OnlyFans celebrates its tenth birthday, it counts more than 5,000 seven-figure earners

These days, massive OnlyFans creators don't make the news as frequently as they did during peak COVID,…

6 hours ago

Meta is paying over $17 billion to settle social media lawsuits. What changes can users expect?

Meta has agreed to pay billions of dollars to resolve its legal dispute with U.S.…

9 hours ago

The BBC says it’ll pay £50,000 for YouTube-first documentaries

The BBC wants original documentaries to publish on its YouTube channel--and it's willing to pay…

10 hours ago

Instagram says that its First Draft feature can edit a Reel in under ten seconds

Instagram is taking on the tedium of video editing. A process that can be laborious can…

1 day ago

What’s hot on TikTok LIVE? You can find out through a new newsletter.

TikTok has a plan to make live streaming less intimidating for new users, and that plan…

1 day ago