Merzigo is making a $200 million bet that some of Hollywood’s most valuable new digital businesses can be built from its oldest television shows.
The digital distribution company plans to invest the money in content in 2027, TheWrap has exclusively learned, with the U.S. a major focus, as it expands partnerships with studios, broadcasters and producers and targets television libraries that could find new audiences — and new revenue — on YouTube and other digital platforms. Former CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures president and CEO Wendy McMahon, now Merzigo’s senior advisor on U.S. media strategy and growth, is helping lead the company’s stateside expansion.
The investment will span rights licensing, U.S.-based production and new YouTube-first projects, McMahon told TheWrap. She is also helping Merzigo deepen relationships with U.S. studios, broadcasters and IP owners.
“At one point, YouTube and social platforms were largely seen as marketing platforms,” McMahon said. “But they are very much distribution and monetization engines.”
That shift is central to Merzigo’s U.S. pitch. As traditional television audiences fragment and media companies look for additional ways to monetize their libraries, the company is betting that decades-old programming can be repackaged and distributed to viewers who may never have encountered it on linear TV.
Merzigo is already working with partners including NBCUniversal, Banijay, Steve Harvey and David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants. Its Letterman partnership encompasses more than 6,000 episodes of “Late Night” and “The Late Show” spanning 1982 through 2015, giving the company decades of material to distribute across digital platforms.
“Great IP is not platform dependent, nor is it meant to sit on shelves,” McMahon said. “It is meant to be rediscovered, reborn even, for new audiences.”
Merzigo says its work with Harvey offers an example of what that can look like. Since the company began operating Harvey’s official YouTube channel and Facebook page in April 2025, YouTube watch time has risen 407%, while the Facebook page has generated 2.62 billion views, according to company data. The YouTube channel now has more than 2.9 million subscribers.
The company has also expanded its relationship with Banijay, recently adding another 9,000 hours of programming. Merzigo said views across the Banijay portfolio it operates grew from 185.7 million in September 2025 to more than 1.18 billion a year later, while revenue has doubled across nearly all of the channels it has taken over, according to the company.
Those figures underscore both the opportunity and the challenge behind Merzigo’s expansion: Media companies have enormous back catalogs, but turning them into meaningful digital businesses requires more than simply uploading old episodes.
McMahon said Merzigo combines technology and data-driven optimization with localization in more than 30 languages, while maintaining human oversight of the brands and franchises it handles.
“You want partners who will grow your business and take care of your brands,” she said.
Merzigo, which says it manages more than 6,000 digital channels and 600,000 hours of content, will put its U.S. expansion in the spotlight at MIPCOM Cannes, where it will co-host the conference’s Oct. 12 opening night party with YouTube.
For McMahon, the opportunity comes down to extending the commercial life of programming that once depended almost entirely on traditional television distribution.
“I’ve spent my career helping great storytelling and iconic IP find its next audience,” she said. “What drew me to Merzigo is that same opportunity.”
