Backlight Showcases Creative Operations Platform at NAB Show 2026, Connecting Media Management to Multi-Platform Publishing
Posted on Wednesday, April 8, 2026
As media libraries scale, and AI becomes central to operations, teams need a strong media foundation beneath them more than ever. Iconik delivers the context AI needs to unlock new possibilities–surfacing the right context faster, automating workflows that once required manual effort, and helping organizations do more with their libraries than they ever could before.
“Media teams are under constant pressure to produce more content while maintaining quality and control,” said Kathleen Barrett, CEO of Backlight. “At NAB 2026, we’re making Iconik even more powerful by extending it further into the content lifecycle. By bringing Wildmoka technology into the Iconik experience, customers can move more seamlessly from managing and collaborating on content to publishing it — without sacrificing flexibility, governance, or the investments they’ve already made.”
This new offering reflects Backlight’s broader product vision: helping media organizations operate through a connected media layer rather than a patchwork of disconnected tools. Most media teams lose critical context—metadata, rights status, approval history—at the handoff between production and distribution. The new capabilities eliminate that gap, letting organizations manage content across their existing storage and tools, collaborate globally, and publish directly to digital destinations with metadata and governance intact throughout.
Iconik powers some of the world’s most demanding media workflows. In 2025 alone, Iconik customers managed 903 million assets across more than 324 petabytes of storage, representing 54% asset growth and 56% data growth year over year. Teams now add more than 11 terabytes of new media every hour, reflecting the accelerating scale of modern content production. Meanwhile, Wildmoka customers published 5.7 million clips on the platform in 2025, amassing some 75 billion views.
“The Iconik x Wildmoka integration has undeniably supercharged our workflow. It’s exceedingly useful,” says Elliott Woodcock, Lead Video Editor at the Goodwood Group. “Wildmoka Clip Studio is incredibly efficient for clipping and distributing content, but now that we’ve connected it with Iconik, we also have this powerful and low-touch ‘live-to-archive’ workflow for full events, where we can also create coverage clips and then easily publish them to Iconik for archival and future use.””
Iconik and Wildmoka: Connecting production to publication
At NAB Show 2026, Backlight will highlight deeper integration between Iconik and Wildmoka, bringing media management and distribution together in a single workflow.
A new native publish panel inside Iconik, powered by Wildmoka, allows teams to push content directly from their managed library to social channels and owned platforms without exporting or transferring files between systems. Teams push content directly from their managed library to social channels and owned platforms, with metadata travelling with the asset.
Backlight will also unveil a completely redesigned Wildmoka Clip Editor—a workspace for media teams to manage live feeds, clip moments, and publish directly to social channels and owned platforms. New capabilities include:
● Points of interest: Turn live feeds into shareable highlights automatically with AI
● Generate AI captions that automatically fit any aspect ratio
● Reformat any clip for vertical in one click, ready for Instagram and TikTok
● Edit video from transcripts: turn dialogue into clips and captions
● Publish to any audience with captions in any language
Advanced storage and data transfer for media at scale
Backlight is also introducing several enhancements to Iconik, its hybrid-cloud media management and creative operations platform that acts as a control plane across existing storage and tools. Instead of requiring infrastructure migration, Iconik indexes and governs media across cloud and on-prem environments so organizations can start quickly and scale as they grow.
Backlight will debut ISG Pro, an enterprise-grade upgrade to the Iconik Storage Gateway, Iconik’s on-premise indexing solution. ISG Pro replaces single-node on-premise ingest with a distributed, multi-node architecture. ISG Pro scales throughput horizontally to match ingest demand, while providing automatic failover so on-premise operations continue uninterrupted if a node goes offline.
Review from anywhere with production-grade, cross-device collaboration
Iconik also continues to expand its review and collaboration capabilities across web, iOS, and desktop, combining production-grade review tools with synchronized real-time collaboration, all backed by the same hybrid infrastructure that governs the rest of the media workflow. New multi-channel audio monitoring adds channel-level control (mute, solo, pan, and level adjustment) directly in the browser, without downloading the file or switching to a dedicated audio tool. Image sequence support will also come to the Iconik Player, Iconik’s native desktop app for frame-accurate playback of professional formats.
Enterprise security and control
Iconik is also expanding its enterprise security capabilities with three new layers of content protection. Digital rights management (DRM) enforcement controls, forensic watermarking, and email allowlisting. Together, these capabilities give enterprise and broadcast customers distributing sensitive content outside their walls the tools to control what happens after it leaves – all embedded in the workflow.
AI-powered metadata for greater content discovery
To help teams locate content across massive libraries, Iconik's existing AI-powered discovery capabilities — including face recognition, object detection, and automated transcription — are now joined by LLM-driven metadata generation. Using everything Iconik already knows about an asset (filename, folder structure, tags, transcripts, and more), Iconik will intelligently suggest new values for metadata fields, allowing creative teams to enrich their libraries with minimal manual effort. Iconik is also introducing more expressive search controls, including new filter modifiers that give teams greater precision over search queries.
About Backlight
Backlight builds the infrastructure that powers modern media production — from first draft to final distribution. Its portfolio of specialized products — Celtx, Ftrack, Iconik, Wildmoka, and Zype — covers every critical stage of the media lifecycle: pre-production, production tracking, media asset management, live content publishing, and video monetization. Creative teams, media ops leaders, and broadcasters use Backlight's tools to move faster, manage content at scale, and reduce the operational friction that slows production down.
