Backlight unifies Iconik and Wildmoka into single platform

Backlight unveiled a series of updates for its Iconik and Wildmoka products at NAB.

The most significant of these is Backlight bringing the two products together under one platform. This enables content to be ingested, managed, reviewed, published, and live-to-digital activation to happen within one connected system.

Additional features Backlight has added to Iconik and Wildmoka include advanced automatic metadata tagging. An AI-powered layer reads the context around every asset — details such as filenames, folder paths, transcriptions, tags, and comments — and suggests structured metadata values. This ensures every asset becomes discoverable from the moment it enters the system.

The company has also added natural language searches, so users can describe what they’re looking for in plain English. The system interprets the request, translates it into structured filters, and returns precise, auditable results. This enables any user to find assets by simply describing what they need.

There are several key updates to the live-to-digital activation features within Wildmoka. It can now automatically reframe horizontal 16:9 footage into vertical 9:16 and square 1:1 formats by tracking the focal point of the action.

The software will also automatically generate text captions from the audio track of any video stream or file, making it possible for teams to add accurate subtitles to clips at speed. Furthermore, captions and subtitles are automatically translated into multiple languages from the source transcript.

Backlight has also added text-based editing to Wildmoka. This enables users to edit clips by working directly with the transcript rather than scrubbing through a timeline. By selecting the words you want to keep or cut, the edit follows suit. Backlight says this makes editing “dramatically faster for talk-heavy content like interviews, press conferences, and commentary — and it lowers the skill floor so anyone who can read a transcript can make an edit”.

Added to this, Wildmoka can now also automatically generate a rated shortlist of candidate moments from a live feed or uploaded file, using AI analysis of the transcript. By the time ingest is complete, key moments are surfaced and ready for clipping, enabling users to start from a curated shortlist instead of scrubbing through raw footage.