The Abu Dhabi-backed production house created by the merger of All3Media and Banijay Entertainment could soon rival streaming giants, according to the chief of its parent company.
Owner Redbird IMI, a joint venture between Abu Dhabi-based International Media Investments (IMI) and Gerry Cardinale’s Redbird Capital, is on its way to become a permanent fixture in global media.
“It’ll be the largest independent production company in the world," Jeff Zucker, chief executive of Redbird IMI, told The National. “We have scale like no one else. And I think this sends a real message to the marketplace that Redbird IMI, both Redbird and IMI and Redbird IMI together, are here to be a major player on the global entertainment platform.”
IMI is a UAE-based media group that also owns The National.
Redbird IMI, which acquired UK-based All3Media for £1.15 billion ($1.51 billion) in 2024, has merged the production powerhouse with Banijay Entertainment, which has its headquarters in Paris. The resulting entity will operate under the Banijay brand.
With a combined revenue exceeding €4.4 billion ($5 billion) and a library of over 260,000 hours of content – including global hits such as The Traitors, MasterChef and Big Brother – Mr Zucker is positioning the company to “step into the ring” with distribution companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
“I think Redbird IMI has tremendous insight into how all the trends are disrupting the media ecosystem, whether that’s entertainment content or news and information. We have experience, we have capital, we have discipline and we have operating experience,” Mr Zucker said. “And so, I think that each of those is really important as we look across all the trends that are really disrupting the media world.”
For the man who once defined the 24-hour cable news landscape at CNN, engineering a sweeping consolidation of the global entertainment industry is a logical step.
“If you want to be in the media space and the entertainment space and the news and information space, then you have to commit. You have to commit to long-term,” said Mr Zucker, who was president of CNN Worldwide from 2013 to 2022. “You have to commit to using AI. And you have to commit to scale. And that’s how we think about it.”
Mr Zucker believes the seismic shifts in how content is consumed require a fundamental change in business discipline. “People are consuming more content and information than ever before. And that’s not going to change. But what is going to change is how they consume it, on what device, where they consume it, how they consume it,” he added.
“AI is going to play a huge role in helping us both produce content and distribute it. And so, it’s just an enormous time of change. But for those who love media, there will be more than ever. And for those who produce it, there will be enormous opportunities.”
Redbird IMI’s strategy is focused on scale and the adoption of AI. Integration of the technology is a critical component to stay ahead, Mr Zucker said. Rather than viewing AI with trepidation, he sees it as a vital means of both producing and distributing content.
Abu Dhabi has become a hub for this technological evolution, providing the “long-term discipline” and “patience” required to build media brands that can survive the current disruption, he added.
“Abu Dhabi is an incredibly important centre for a lot of what’s going on, not just because it’s a great home for long-term capital and for opportunities of scale,” he said. “It’s the centre of what’s going on in the AI world."
In the news sector, there is a growing trust in independent creators over traditional institutions. “People still want to be informed and they want to know what’s going on, but they trust independent journalists much more now,” Mr Zucker said. “Brands do still matter, but individual brands are powerful as well.”
However, the future remains unknown, he added. “Anybody who predicts where the media world’s going to be in five years, I’d run away. Because nobody can predict it.”
