Backlight, which powers Iconik and Wildmoka to power video workflows for large media and entertainment organizations, announced the 2026 Iconik Media Stats Report, revealing how efficiency and scale are reshaping media operations. While content production is prolific, production schedules are shrinking and marketers are faced with high storage costs and unusable archives as data storage reaches record highs amid growing demand from AI data centers.
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This report shows that traditional tools and workflows struggle to keep up with the volume and needs of media. Key findings include:
- When purchasing cloud storage, asset type is more important than number of assets
- Video files are only 14% of your assets but consume 64% of your storage needs
- Audio assets grew 45% year-over-year due to increased demand for podcasts, voiceovers, music libraries, and multilingual audio tracks.
- Vertical publishing increased by 120%. While 16:9 landscape continues to account for over 90% of published clips, it is losing ground to vertical content.
This report highlights the increasing adoption of AI in media management. In 2025, AI capabilities across Backlight’s product suite were used more than 11.4 million times to automate tasks and turn raw media into searchable assets. AI is being used to unlock value by increasing operational maturity without replacing creative decision-making.
“When bringing AI to media asset management, the technology must go beyond just video search capabilities to provide a deep understanding of the content that users own,” said Kathleen Barrett, CEO of Backlight. “The ability to instantly discover and quickly collaborate on millions of assets, regardless of your exact demands and parameters, opens the door to more time and opportunity to find inspiration, create new types of storytelling, and innovate with your assets.”
The report also provided insights into data usage breakdown by industry, number of jobs processed by job title, data flow between on-premises and cloud storage, and internal collaboration by Iconik users.
This data comes from Iconik’s internal database containing over 903 million assets. Since its inception, this report has tracked:
- The number of assets increased by 9,306% from 9.6 million to 903 million.
- Total storage capacity increased by 6,943% from 4.6 PB to 324 PB
- Video and audio duration increased by +4,636% and +8,122% respectively
This is Backlight’s sixth year of publishing media data to provide insight into evolving media management needs, AI adoption, and industry growth trends.
