Backlight releases its sixth annual report, highlighting key trends and challenges in media asset management
Backlight, the company behind Iconik and Wildmoka, which power video workflows for large media and entertainment organizations, released the 2026 Iconik Media Stats Report, revealing how efficiency and scale are reshaping media operations. Content production is prolific, while production timelines are shrinking, and as data storage reaches an all-time high amidst increased demand from AI data centers, marketers are facing high storage costs and unusable archives.
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The report shows that traditional tools and workflows will struggle to keep up with media volume and needs. Key findings include:
Asset type matters more than asset count when purchasing cloud storage
Despite representing only 14% of assets, video files consume 64% of storage needs
Audio assets grew by 45% year-over-year, driven by increasing demand for podcasts, voice-overs, music libraries, and multi-language audio tracks.
Vertical publishing increased by 120%. While 16:9 landscape continues to represent more than 90% of published clips, it’s losing ground to vertical content.
The report highlights the increased adoption of AI for media management. In 2025, AI features across Backlight’s product suite were used more than 11.4M times to automate tasks and turn raw media into searchable assets. AI is being used to unlock value by amplifying operational maturity, without replacing creative decision-making.
“When it comes to having AI in media asset management, technology has to go beyond just having search capabilities for videos, but rather create a deep understanding of the content you have,” said Kathleen Barrett, CEO of Backlight. “The ability to find and quickly collaborate on millions of assets instantaneously, despite precise demands and parameters, opens the door for more time and opportunities to find inspiration, create new types of storytelling, and innovate on assets.”
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The report also provided breakdowns of the data usage by industry, the number of jobs processed by job type, how data flows between on-prem and cloud storage, and insights into internal collaboration by Iconik users.
This data comes from Iconik’s internal database of over 903 million assets. Since its inception, this report has tracked:
A 9,306% increase in asset count from 9.6 million to 903 million.
A 6,943% increase in total storage, from 4.6 PB to 324 PB
Video and audio duration growth of +4,636% and +8,122%, respectively
This marks the sixth year Backlight has released its media data to provide insight into evolving media management needs, AI adoption, and industry growth trends.
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