Banijay Rebuilds Gaming Arm as All3Media Deal Bulks Up IP Bank
If you’ve ever spun Deal or No Deal or Big Brother on a UK casino site, you’ve already met Banijay’s gaming arm, even if you never clocked the name. This week the TV and entertainment group gave that division a proper shake-up, installing new leadership just as its freshly completed merger with All3Media hands it a much bigger catalogue of shows to work with.
What’s been released
Banijay Rights has expanded its Gaming & Gambling team following its merger with All3Media International.
Mark Woollard has been appointed Senior Vice President of Gaming & Gambling, taking responsibility for Banijay Rights’ gaming and gambling operations as the distributor looks to maximise its expanded portfolio.
He’s not new to the territory:
Woollard joined the group’s Gambling division, Endemol Games, in 2013 and has since held senior roles including Director of Banijay Brands’ Global Licensing Division and Commercial Director of EndemolShine Gaming.
He won’t be working alone.
Andreas Demetriou, who has spent three years at Banijay Rights, will report to Woollard as Sales Manager.
The gaming reshuffle sits alongside a parallel move in licensing, where
the appointment comes alongside the hiring of David Christopher as Group Director of the firm’s Licensing and Merchandising team.
CEO Cathy Payne framed both hires as a response to the group’s new scale, saying the strengthened teams
“bring a wealth of experience to unlock and maximise our expanded portfolio across multiple markets.”
What’s changed
The timing matters. Banijay and All3Media completed their merger over the summer, creating a combined production and distribution giant that now controls a catalogue stretching from Peaky Blinders and MasterChef to All3Media properties such as The Traitors, Gogglebox, Undercover Boss and Call the Midwife. For a gaming division built almost entirely on turning hit formats into branded casino content, that’s a significantly deeper well to draw from than the one it had before.
Endemol Games, the unit Woollard has worked within since 2013, has long been the engine behind TV-themed slots and table games that UK players will recognise instantly: Deal or No Deal, Big Brother, Countdown, Catchphrase, Bullseye and Golden Balls among them, with Deal or No Deal alone spawning multiple spin-off variants over the years. Those titles sit on major UK-facing casino and bookmaker platforms, and the appeal has always been straightforward: Banijay owns the underlying IP outright, so there’s no third-party licensing friction standing between a hit format and a playable slot.
Where it fits
For UK players, the practical upshot of a leadership reset like this rarely shows up overnight, but it’s worth watching. A gaming division with fresh commercial leadership and a much larger shelf of owned IP is exactly the kind of setup that tends to produce new branded slot and game-show tie-ins over the following year or two, rather than an immediate drop of new titles. Whether that means a Traitors-themed live format, a Gogglebox-flavoured slot, or simply a deeper rollout of existing Deal or No Deal variants, the restructuring puts Banijay’s gaming team in a stronger position to pitch UK operators on fresh branded content than it’s been in for some time.
It also reflects a broader pattern UK players will recognise from elsewhere in the market: as studios and media groups consolidate, their casino-facing divisions tend to get reorganised to make the most of newly combined IP libraries. For a sector that has always leaned on familiar television and entertainment brands to pull players towards new slots, a bigger Banijay catalogue under a reshaped commercial team is one to keep an eye on heading into next year.
