The Challenge

AI-native production creates incredible speed and scale, but it also breaks the traditional chain of authorship, rights and royalty tracking. Artists risk being left behind as their work moves through AI pipelines with no provenance or usage controls.

The Collaboration

Showrunner, an AI TV platform, commissioned Backstage Pass, a new AI-native TV show co-created by a team of artists from AMO Animation and The AI Film Company (Wales UK) led by Director Asa Bailey. Every asset, from characters to sets to shots, was wrapped in a .Dave metadata sidecar before delivery.

What .Dave Did

Locked provenance and authorship at the point of creation
Embedded royalty splits and usage rules in the files themselves
Ensured this information persisted from first mile to last mile of the production workflow
Created a verifiable audit trail for human contributions

The Outcome

Just weeks after being first announced, on September 24th, 2025 The AI Film Company delivered the first set of assets for Backstage Pass AI TV Show to the Showrunner AI TV platform. This marks the first live deployment of .Dave at studio scale. Shortly after the CEO of Showrunner publicly endorsed the project and the format on social media, validating its importance.

Why It Matters

Proves .Dave can run in production, not just theory
Establishes a model for how AI platforms can integrate rights and provenance at the file level
Shows a pathway for human artists to get paid fairly in AI-enabled workflows

What’s Next: The .Dave Roadmap

The AI Film Company and Showrunner are working to push .Dave far beyond a metadata sidecar. The next steps already in development:

Automated Rights Clearinghouse
Direct integration between .Dave files and a clearinghouse API to automate royalty splits, usage approvals, and payouts.
Creator Dashboards
A secure dashboard for artists to register, track and update their assets, see usage analytics, and receive payment information in real time.
.Dave SDK Tools
Open developer kit providing:
• Hash generation (SHA-256 or Blake3) for asset fingerprinting
• Standardized file naming utilities to enforce unique provenance IDs
• Asset harvesting scripts to bulk-wrap existing libraries in .Dave metadata
• Sandbox builder utilities for setting up controlled IP worlds with consistent provenance rules
• Language bindings (Python, Node, C++) for easy integration into pipelines
Cross-Platform Adoption
Partnerships with AI production tools and platforms so .Dave files stay intact across the entire production and distribution lifecycle.
Smart Contracts & On-Chain Proofs
Optional cryptographic proofs for provenance and authorship to make licensing portable across jurisdictions and platforms.
Certification & Compliance
A formal certification mark and testing suite to ensure assets carrying the .Dave tag meet provenance and rights standards.

“Artists need paying too. .Dave makes that possible at the file level.” — Asa Bailey

The aim is not just metadata. It’s an ecosystem. Rights, provenance and royalties need to be machine-native. And .Dave is being tooled to make that practical at scale.

Find out more about the .Dave file format here

First .Dave delivery for Showrunner AI TV Platform