Towards the end of 2025, Merzigo signed a multi-year partnership with All3Media International to manage and monetise a selection of premium British catalogue titles across YouTube, Facebook, and FAST channels. On the surface, this looks like a familiar move: a major distributor extending its digital monetisation footprint through an experienced operator. Merzigo is not a new entrant, and its partnerships with large rights holders are now well-established. What makes this deal worth examining is not novelty, but what it reveals about where value is now being created and reshaped, particularly within Europe’s fragmented, rights-led catalogue economy A Material Shift for European Rights Owners This shift is particularly material for European rights owners, especially those sitting on deep catalogues originally designed for linear economics. For decades, catalogue value was largely predictable. It was shaped by territory, windowing, and licensing cycles. Rights moved through a known sequence; value was realised at the point of sale and then largely fixed. What happened after that transaction mattered little, commercially speaking. That logic was built for conditions that no longer apply in environments where catalogue content remains continuously exposed to audiences, algorithms, and feedback loops long after its original broadcast life. Value no longer crystallises at a single commercial moment; it evolves through use, relevance, and sustained engagement over time. The Merzigo-All3Media partnership sits squarely within that tension. From Distribution to Value Creation Traditional distributors optimised for reach. Digital studios optimised for formats. FAST aggregators optimised for inventory. What Merzigo represents is not simply another optimisation layer, but a more intentional approach to extracting economic value from content libraries over time. This is not about launching channels or extending brand presence. It is about treating catalogue content as an asset whose commercial potential continues to unfold well beyond its initial valuation. Value is created through iteration, localisation, adaptation, and responsiveness to audience behaviour, not as a one-off transaction, but as an ongoing process. Catalogue assets are reformatted, repositioned, and recontextualised as signals emerge, allowing value to compound rather than simply decay. The implication is subtle but significant. Economic leverage shifts away from placement alone, and towards those shaping how content is discovered, used, and sustained across its extended life. Over time, the intelligence generated through this process does not remain confined to the catalogue. It begins to inform how future content is shaped, what travels, what adapts, and what retains value once it leaves the confines of its original commissioning logic. Catalogue Value Becomes Dynamic. And Contingent For much of television’s history, catalogue value was relatively stable. Once rights were licensed, the economic outcome was largely known. What followed mattered little to the asset’s underlying worth. That stability reflected the conditions of its time. Value was realised at discrete commercial moments, bounded by territory, windowing, and contractual limits. In today’s digital environments, catalogue value is increasingly shaped by discoverability, adaptability, algorithmic relevance, and responsiveness to audience behaviour unfolding over time rather than at a single transaction. Unlike traditional TV distribution, these platforms operate globally and optimise for audience signals rather than territorial sales agreements, allowing value to emerge and shift independently of established windowing logic. This does not eliminate traditional distribution. It reframes it. Some assets now accrue value long after their original commercial life, while others quietly lose relevance despite remaining owned and available. The challenge for rights owners lies not in the content itself, but in the systems governing how value is recognised, stewarded, and allowed to evolve. Once value is no longer fixed at a single point of valuation, economic durability is shaped not only by ownership but by how value is stewarded over time. Why the European Dimension Matters This is not a Silicon Valley story. It is a European one. A Turkish operator working with UK-originated catalogue IP distributed globally by All3Media reflects a deeper structural reality. Europe’s television economy has never been built around a single dominant platform or vertically integrated ecosystem. Instead, it has evolved through layers of rights ownership, distribution intermediaries, public and private broadcasters, and cross-border sales. That fragmentation is often framed as a weakness - a lack of scale, coherence, or decisive control. Yet in an environment where value creation, execution, and rights governance are increasingly separable, it may prove to be Europe’s advantage. But only if those layers can be orchestrated deliberately, rather than left to accumulate unmanaged. What Happens Next Is Not About Distribution The harder questions now are not about distribution, but about how value is recognised and measured. As catalogue value extends beyond its initial valuation, traditional markers of success - licence fees secured, windows closed, territories sold - no longer explain how value is actually generated over time. What will increasingly matter is not only what content earns but also how it sustains demand over longer periods across platforms, formats, and consumption patterns. This is TV economics beyond CPMs. |
