MIPCOM 2025 Report: How Creator-Led and AI-Driven Strategies Are Changing the Economics of Global Content

Our team returned from MIPCOM 2025 last week and brought some interesting insights and a sense of the atmosphere on the ground. The energy in Cannes this year felt different from the moment people set foot on the Croisette. There was a sense that the walls that once separated “traditional television,” “digital-first,” and “user-generated” have finally collapsed, and the two worlds have truly met and synergised. 

The mood suggested that the industry has finally accepted that audiences now rule the market, screens are interchangeable, and talent is no longer defined by where it originates. Anyone who fails to understand this sooner will probably struggle.

Let’s have a closer look at some of the most spoken-about trends from MIPCOM 2025 that our team noticed.

How YouTube Led the Creators’ Economy Agenda at MIPCOM 2025

A few years ago, the presence of YouTube in a premium television market would have been discussed as a curiosity or an expansion attempt. In 2023 and even part of 2024, major studios still treated platforms like YouTube as adjacent to the business, not part of it.

This year, YouTube didn’t just show up... it held the floor.

It co-hosted sessions, drove programming discussions, and appeared repeatedly in announcement conversations that previously would have been handled by broadcast groups and studio banners. The most telling signal wasn’t its visibility but who was standing beside it: BBC Studios, Banijay, and other legacy players aligning with YouTube as a tool for IP origination, fan acquisition, and talent infrastructure.

The creators’ economy has been discussed at countless trade events over the past several years. Still, MIPCOM 2025 marked the moment it stopped being treated as a parallel market and became an integrated feeder system for mainstream titles, on-screen talent, and a testing ground for format durability. It is now about joint commissioning, shared IP incubation, and fan communities being part of the development arc. The idea of waiting until a project is finished before learning whether it connects with an audience already feels outdated, and building content around audience preference is the new normal.

YouTube’s undeniable presence in the kids and teen market was evident through the MIPJunior programming lens. Only a few years ago, broadcasters still framed YouTube as a distraction pulling young viewers away from structured programming. This year, nobody even used that language because the power dynamic has reversed. For anyone working in animation, tween franchises, or early teen content, YouTube is the environment where new IP oxygenates and builds emotional familiarity before it ever arrives on a streamer or FAST channel. When a character or personality first lives natively inside platform culture, it comes in television with a community rather than a blank slate. For younger audiences, the origin of a title is irrelevant, as linear, digital-first, FAST, and UGC all exist on the same plane.

“A decade ago, studios and distributors feared the cannibalization of their series and films' value if exhibited on YouTube. Now, the learnings have proven YouTube to be additive and an important method of reaching new and different audiences, so much so that all major studios and even networks and streamers now have a YouTube presence and clear strategy to supplement their primary distribution or exhibition plans,” said Tyler Massey, Head of Sales at ContentX Labs and Business Development Manager at allrites.

This explains why so many panels at MIPCOM weren’t about “how to get youth audiences back,” but about meeting them where they already form relationships with content. Traditional media used to view distribution as the last step. The emerging mindset treats distribution as the first live test to determine whether something is worth continuing. This is also why creators are now being treated less like one-off marketing tools and more like early-stage co-creators of IP.

Microdramas Are Catching Heat Like Popcorn in a Hot Pan

And of course, the industry is buzzing about Microdramas, the format that we at Allrites have also been exploring recently. What started as a breakout success story from China has now become part of the global commissioning vocabulary. While this format is still undergoing experimentation and adaptation around the world, it can hardly be called a novelty now that so many major players are adopting it or preparing to do so. Take FOX, which publicly committed to producing 200 Microdramas over the next two years, and you get a clear picture of where this is heading.

Microdramas now function as a built-in agility layer for content strategy. They allow studios and streamers to test tone, characters, emotional arcs, performance hooks, and audience appetite in real time without committing feature-length resources until demand is established. Instead of “will this format stick?” the logic has become “what is the fastest and most cost-efficient path to knowing?” In many ways, Microdramas have quietly become the space where ideas either earn their expansion or gracefully exit before they inflate cost.

Interest in the format is also spreading outside Asia, across EMEA and Latin America, more quickly than many expected. These markets are structurally primed for mobile-first consumption and short-cycle testing, which makes Microdramas less of a trend and more of a natural reflection of audience pace. The opportunity is not simply about shorter episodes but about faster proof of relevance. A show doesn’t need 10 or 12 scripted hours before it learns whether it deserves its second life; it can realise within weeks (sometimes days!) and then scale outward once it already carries traction.

“Microdramas were all the buzz as studios and producers aim to create cost-effective content targeting audiences where they are — on social apps. These bite-sized vertical stories are proving to be embraced more and more in North America and beyond, after taking Asia by storm. With engaging storylines and cliff-hangers at the end of every short episode, the industry is keen to see how this popular new model will grow in terms of audience engagement and if it will have staying power long term,” added Tyler.

AI as the Bridge Between Creators and Premium Production

Running underneath both of these themes was a quieter but equally important message: the normalization and acceptance of AI. Last year, AI was the headline at almost every content market, but this year, it was a part of all the conversations around effective production and distribution infrastructure. It showed up as a tool within the panels for workflow, development acceleration, marketing iteration, and creative augmentation. In 2023 and 2024, people asked whether AI would change the business, and this year, they talked about how to integrate it responsibly now that the change has already happened.

The tone around AI has matured. It was framed less as a disruption and more as an efficiency layer that compresses costs, shortens timelines, and removes friction in early-stage production. This repositions AI from something companies plan to explore to something they are expected to have already embedded in their pipeline.

AI also emerged as the connective tissue between the creators’ economy and traditional production. The historical barrier for UGC-born talent has not been creativity or audience reach but an access to production scale. AI narrows that gap. Instead of requiring studio-level resources to achieve polish, creators can now bring projects much closer to broadcast-ready without the need for industrial infrastructure.

“AI was a hot topic again this year at MIPCOM. With more familiarity of what tools and apps are being developed by AI for use not only by the general public but by the film and TV industry itself, there is more awareness and openness to exploring how AI can be used by producers, studios, and distributors to help increase efficiencies across production, costs, and workflows. And for those who hold data training rights to catalogs and libraries, there is a growing interest in monetizing those rights in an ethical and meaningful way. ContentX Labs is proud to help rightsholders embrace this new revenue stream and realize new, impactful income that does not interfere with traditional distribution strategies,” said Tyler.

The result is a structural levelling effect: the path from creator-originated IP to premium television is faster, cheaper, and less gatekept than at any point in the past decade.

FAST Channels Signal a Different Growth Curve in Europe

Another recurring theme at MIPCOM 2025 was that FAST hasn’t peaked everywhere at the same time. While North America has already entered its maturity phase and is consolidating rather than expanding, Europe is still in its acceleration window. Several panels pointed out that even though the global market saw a temporary cooldown in late 2024 and early 2025, the number of FAST channels continued to grow across key European territories in terms of volume, usage time and channel exclusivity.

This momentum is driven by two structural factors: cost sensitivity and platform behaviour. In Europe and Latin America, audiences remain more price-conscious than in North America, which naturally pushes them toward AVOD and free ad-supported models rather than additional subscriptions. At the same time, the integration of FAST into connected TV ecosystems and into SVOD platforms as a retention strategy is making discovery frictionless. In markets where smart TV adoption is now mainstream, FAST is just the same old television, just on different rails.

By mid-2025, there were roughly 1,850 active FAST channels globally, representing a 14% increase since Q1 this year and a 76% increase since 2023. Europe is a meaningful part of that expansion. Services like Pluto TV, Rakuten TV, Samsung TV Plus, Xumo and The Roku Channel (now expanding beyond the UK into continental Europe) are shaping a market driven less by novelty and more by infrastructure as FAST is simply becoming part of the fabric of home viewing. Hours of available programming continue to rise, and there is a visible shift toward exclusive and genre-specific channels rather than endless catalogue reskins.

Content Licensing Is Evolving in an Audience-First Market

Across these three trends, the broader signal is that television is no longer linear in its path from idea to distribution. The development funnel used to be exclusive: create internally, test privately, distribute only when ready. The new funnel is more open-ended: test in the wild, refine with real audience behavior, and scale only once demand is evidenced. It is an inversion of risk, where the audience participates earlier, and the financial commitment deepens only after a story proves it deserves longevity.

This also explains why more buyers and sellers are looking for flexibility in rights management and windows. If a title begins as a mobile-first test case and later becomes a streamer or FAST success, it no longer fits the old static licensing model. The lifecycle of content is changing shape, so the commercial frameworks around it are being forced to evolve in parallel. Rights-holders are increasingly interested in layered monetization rather than one-shot licensing, and platforms want licensing structures that let titles evolve rather than remain frozen in a single category.

Content rotation is significant nowadays, as FAST channels don’t rely solely on refreshed lineups. A FAST channel is not a static shelf like a VOD library, but a programmed television that must feel alive. If the schedule doesn’t shift, viewership drops, dwell time declines, and ad yield follows. This is why FAST buyers gravitate toward flexible catalogue access rather than fixed, long-locked slates. The model rewards refresh, not permanence.

From our perspective at allrites, we already see changes in buyer behavior throughout the year. There is significantly more interest in catalogue mobility —not just acquisition, but also rotation. There is more appetite for format testing and shorter-term commitments that allow titles to prove their traction before taking larger shelf space. And there is more inbound conversation about licensed datasets and video inputs for AI-driven workflows, not because AI is a buzzword, but because it is now an integrated part of production and pipeline economics.

A library now needs to be flexible and not just extensive. A title’s value is increasingly measured by how fluidly it can move from one use case to another and how cash-flow friendly those movements are. The same piece of content might first appear in a short-form environment, then expand into CTV or FAST, and later strengthen its monetization through data licensing. Still, none of that works when rights are locked inside rigid, multi-year contracts with no movement incentives.

This is the moment when licensing shifts as production does. As the development pipeline becomes more responsive, licensing models are following suit. 

In that sense, MIPCOM 2025 felt like a year of alignment, where the market finally admitted that audiences have already shaped the new reality, and now the industry is meeting them where they are. The convergence of creators and studios isn’t aspirational anymore; it is operational. Microdramas aren’t an experiment; they are infrastructure. AI isn’t a thought exercise; it is baseline plumbing. And licensing is shifting accordingly, from ownership to agility, from single-use to multi-path, from static deals to adaptive ones.

About allrites

Located in Singapore and globally, allrites is a premier marketplace for buying and selling film, TV, and sports rights. We provide a vast catalog of Film and TV content, from major studios to independent producers, available in any language and genre. Our innovative licensing models, including allrites Content-as-a-Service, offer flexible and efficient content monetization and acquisition solutions, accommodating the evolving needs of content buyers and sellers worldwide.

Want to learn more about our content library, licensing models, or industry trends?

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