Why the Next Generation of Screen Talent Needs to Think Like IP Owners. Not Just Creators.
- Engine Pop
- May 5
- 4 min read
ENGINE ROOM NEWS & INSIGHTS | DIGITAL GROWTH | MAY 2026
By Engine Room - Athena Witter, Founder, Engine Pop
Last month, The TV Collective's founder Simone Pennant MBE received the BAFTA TV Craft Special Award — recognition for two decades of work supporting Global Majority talent across the UK screen industries. It was a well-deserved moment for an organisation that has genuinely shifted how the industry thinks about talent, leadership and progression.
I was proud to have contributed to that work. As an expert on The TV Collective's Podcast Season 3 and across their Breakthrough Leaders programme, I delivered a session on IP strategy, monetisation, the attention economy and how creators can build commercially durable businesses — not just content. That material was used to educate the cohort and distributed across TVC's social channels and YouTube. It clearly resonated and I'm glad it played a part in the bigger picture.
But the experience also reinforced something I see constantly in my work through Engine Pop: the talent development conversation in this industry still has a massive gap when it comes to commercial architecture and IP ownership.
The gap nobody's filling
We're good at teaching people how to make things. How to produce. How to pitch. How to get commissioned. What we're not teaching them is how to own what they make — and why that matters more than almost anything else.
The difference between a career that builds equity and one that doesn't often comes down to decisions made before a single frame is shot. How IP is structured. Where the rights sit. Whether the commercial architecture supports one revenue cycle or ten. These are not creative decisions — they're business decisions. And most emerging talent, regardless of background, is never taught to make them.
Content is not the same as IP
This is the distinction that changes everything. Content is what you make. IP is what you own. Content generates attention. IP generates revenue — repeatedly, across multiple platforms, territories and formats, over time.
When I work with producers, founders and platforms through Engine Pop, the diagnostic almost always starts in the same place: the IP was never designed to be a business. It was designed to be a show, or a channel, or a format. The revenue problem isn't distribution or marketing — it's structural. It was baked in from the start.
Emerging talent is particularly exposed here. If you don't understand rights, you sign them away. If you don't understand platform economics, you optimise for the wrong metrics. If you don't understand what makes IP commercially durable — the ability to generate revenue across multiple windows, territories and time horizons — you build something that works once and then stops.
Why this matters now more than ever
The industry is contracting. Commissioning budgets are shrinking. The boundaries between TV, film, digital and streaming are dissolving. Talent that only knows one lane — or only knows how to make content without understanding how to own and commercialise it — is increasingly vulnerable.
At the same time, the creator economy is exploding. There are more routes to market than ever before. But more routes to market doesn't mean more routes to sustainable revenue. Without commercial architecture, a million views is just a number.
This is what I covered in my sessions with The TV Collective's cohort: how to unlock commercial value across platforms, why IP only pays when you invest in it properly — through brand, formats and consistency — how the attention economy actually works, and why depth beats breadth when it comes to building something that converts. The response told me this wasn't information they'd been given before. That's the gap.
What needs to change
Talent development programmes, accelerators, and industry initiatives do vital work. But if they're only teaching craft and access - how to get in the room and how to make the work —they're only doing half the job. The other half is commercial literacy: how IP works, how rights work, how revenue architecture works, and how to make decisions at the design stage that determine whether what you build becomes a durable business or a one-cycle event.
This is what Engine Pop exists to do. We work with producers, founders, platforms and investors to diagnose commercial risk and design IP that's built to last. But the same thinking needs to be embedded much earlier in the talent pipeline — before people have already signed away their rights, optimised for the wrong platform, or built something brilliant that they don't own.
The BAFTA recognition for The TV Collective is a marker of how far the talent development conversation has come. The next step is making sure that conversation includes the commercial architecture that determines who actually benefits from the work.
Because the question isn't just: can you make it? It's: do you own it?
Athena Witter is the founder of Engine Pop, a creative and commercial IP strategy studio working with producers, founders and organisations building IP in a digital-first world.She has over 25 years of experience across BBC Studios, Fremantle, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, and has led IP and commercial strategy across franchises including Bluey, Doctor Who, Britain's Got Talent, The X Factor, Love Island and I'm A Celebrity.
The media landscape never stands still. Platforms evolve. Audiences shift. Formats fragment. Yet, the challenge remains: how do we build growth that lasts?
Contact Engine Pop hello@enginepop.co
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