Rusk Media taps veteran dealmaker Tyler Massey to lead US push

CALIFORNIA: Tyler Massey has spent 20-odd years selling other people’s stories to the world. Now he is selling America on India’s. The veteran distribution hand has joined Rusk Media as vice president, content & strategic partnerships, a grand title for a blunt mandate: build America from scratch for a company that has already conquered India.

Rusk arrives with a fat catalogue of Indian reality, entertainment, animated and feature IP, and a plan to Americanise it fast. Massey gets full profit-and-loss responsibility for the United States arm, spanning development, licensing and partnerships. The marquee project is Alright! TV, a Gen Z-facing app launching this autumn, stuffed with reality shows, microdramas and animation. Microdrama, the bite-sized vertical-video format that has quietly become one of the most lucrative genres in Asian streaming, is the bet within the bet. Rusk wants Massey to find and acquire content for the format as aggressively as he once sold finished tape into 150 countries.

The hire is shrewd. Massey is not a studio lifer; he is a dealmaker’s dealmaker, the sort of executive who has sat on both sides of nearly every kind of transaction global television offers. At IM Global he shifted The Putin Interview and Michael Jackson’s Halloween into international markets. At Eyeworks he grew a sales operation eightfold, hawking format hits such as Celebrity Splash to nearly 30 territories. At Storyworld Entertainment he adapted Russian IP for English-language audiences, a dry run for exactly the job Rusk now wants done with Indian IP. In between, he has moonlighted as an expert witness in format and IP-infringement lawsuits, which suggests he understands the value of content rights rather better than most.

There is a parallel bet running alongside the Rusk job. Massey is also chief executive and co-founder of ContentX Labs, a marketplace licensing film, television and sports archives as training data for artificial-intelligence developers, spun out of his earlier role as senior vice president of global sales at Allrites. That two-track career, content distribution by day and AI-data licensing on the side, captures where the media business is heading: value increasingly sits not just in finished shows but in the underlying libraries themselves, sliced up for whichever buyer, human or machine, wants them next.

For Rusk, betting on a 20-year distribution veteran to build a youth-skewing app is a hedge worth watching. Content strategy is the easy part; getting American Gen Z to open yet another app is the hard one. Massey’s job is to prove that Indian IP, repackaged with Hollywood polish, can do it.