Vancouver-based media tech firm BBTV Holdings, which went private in early 2024, has rebranded to RHEI and launched a new data monetization platform called RHEI Data Pro.
“We are no longer in the creator economy. This is the augmented creativity era.”
Shahrzad Rafati
RHEI
The new platform is meant to help digital content creators, like YouTubers, license out their existing content for training artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The platform is launching having already secured more than $35 million in committed partnerships from AI companies, RHEI chairperson and CEO Shahrzad Rafati said in a LinkedIn post.
“RHEI is committed to ensuring that creators are empowered to actively take part in the evolution of AI by ensuring they are fairly compensated when their content and data fuel innovation,” Rafati said in a statement.
RHEI says its per-hour pricing model compensates creators based on the “unique value” of each video they consent to being licensed. RHEI says it manages “all aspects of data preparation and augmentation” to ensure the content meets the requirements of major technology companies, such as adding in relevant metadata.
The company claims that every 1,000 hours of licensed content can earn creators up to $100,000 from multiple licensing transactions, while still retaining full ownership rights.
RHEI Data Pro appears to be aiming to offer a solution to AI models training on data that hasn’t been legally cleared for that purpose. BetaKit has previously spoken with experts that assert academics, nonprofits, and early-stage AI startups are struggling to find material they can access for free to train their models, and numerous companies have recently filed lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement from non-consensual AI training on their content.
RHEI was founded in 2005 as BBTV. It was initially a hardware company, but quickly pivoted to technology that detected and helped monetize fan uploads of copyrighted media content. In more recent years, it acted as a multi-channel network that helped online creators manage, distribute, and monetize their content. Based on RHEI’s website, the company appears to still be offering these management services.
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The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2020, much like many other Canadian tech companies, but began to struggle and cut staff as market conditions deteriorated.
The company notably faced a now-settled dispute with popular content creator Ethan Klein of h3h3 Productions in early 2023 as YouTube creators expressed concerns around BBTV’s revenue splits and approach to paying out creators at the time. The public quarrel began after Klein claimed that BBTV had violated its contract with his H3 Podcast by taking a 30-percent cut of its YouTube channel membership revenue, which Klein later said BBTV had paid back.
In January 2024, BBTV officially went private when it was acquired and then merged with a holding company that was owned by Rafati and BBTV director Hamed Shahbazi, who is also the chair and CEO of fellow TSX-listed and Vancouver-based firm Well Health Technologies.
In her LinkedIn post, Rafati says RHEI and its new Data Pro platform are part of a new vision for creativity.
“This is just the beginning. We are no longer in the creator economy. This is the augmented creativity era,” Rafati’s post reads.
Feature image courtesy Xuthoria, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.