TellyCast Digital Video Awards 2026 has named River Monsters from ITV Studios and Zoo 55 as winner of the Digital Catalogue Exploitation category.
The award celebrates the creative repackaging and repurposing of existing IP for digital audiences, with judges recognising projects that successfully unlock new engagement, audiences and commercial value from archive content.
Originally broadcast as a global factual entertainment hit following extreme angler Jeremy Wade, River Monsters found renewed success in 2025 through a digital-first relaunch strategy designed to reinvent the archive for modern viewing habits. Rather than reposting existing episodes, the team restructured content into 86 digital-only themed compilations tailored specifically for YouTube and social platforms.
The strategy focused on audience-led programming and platform-native optimisation. Fan interactions directly informed content creation, including Jeremy Wade’s Ultimate FISH ALPHABET Challenge, which generated 3.5 million views and more than 10,000 new subscribers from a single video. Alongside long-form compilations, the team leaned heavily into short-form discovery content.
The project demonstrated how archive TV can be reconstructed, allowing legacy content to feel relevant for younger audiences without additional filming costs. Judges praised the project as a “fantastic audience-first approach to creating fresh-feeling content out of programme archive,” highlighting its innovative use of creator playbooks, strong balance between Shorts and long-form content, and “brilliant way to mine archive and create a channel worth watching.”
