State of Streaming Podcast

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Tim sits down with Alexander Dao, Vice President of Advertising & Sponsorships at Electronic Arts, to break down the official launch of the EA advertising platform and explore how console gaming is becoming one of the most powerful performance channels in the digital ecosystem. Recorded following the platform's official launch at Cannes Lions.

The controller is where fandom starts — gaming is the new front door to sports. Modern audiences are trading passive television broadcasts for highly interactive console experiences, shifting where living room attention lives. Gaming isn't just complementing sports viewing; it's driving it. Studies show 35% to 40% of soccer fans actually fell in love with the sport through playing EA Sports titles before ever watching broadcast matches or attending games in person. For younger generations, the controller is where sports fandom begins, serving as a primary discovery portal for player skills, team dynamics, and league rules.

• 2:29 – Why EA launched an ad platform now and where consumer living room attention is shifting
• 3:15 – The study showing 35% to 40% of soccer fans became fans through EA video games
• 3:50 – How gaming serves as a primary discovery portal for younger sports fans

Beyond static logos: turning ad placements into interactive player experiences. In-game advertising has evolved far past static background banners into dynamic, native brand moments that add genuine value to gameplay. Dao outlines EA's strategy of combining real-world broadcast authenticity with player progression. Case in point: Visa created squad-building challenges that unlocked Visa-branded stadiums and vanity kits, while Red Bull tied in-game custom stadiums to the real-world "Wings Cup" tournament, flying winners to the Miami finals and printing EA Sports FC QR codes on hundreds of millions of retail cans worldwide.

• 4:36 – The three pillars of modern sports fandom: passive, active, and interactive
• 5:49 – Balancing player value with brand authenticity in native gaming environments
• 6:45 – Case studies: Visa's squad-building challenges and Red Bull's global Wings Cup & QR cans

Lowering the barrier to entry: dynamic targeting and sports licensing extensions. For marketers intimidated by custom, expensive gaming builds, EA's ad platform introduces scalable dynamic capabilities across titles. Brands with existing sports licenses can naturally extend their reach into interactive environments, while non-endemic brands without licenses can leverage EA's own IP—such as Ultimate Team in FC. Moreover, dynamic targeting enables flexible geotargeted campaigns, allowing brands to buy shorter flight dates in specific markets like Canada rather than committing to global multi-year buys.

• 8:58 – Why interactive in-game experiences build stronger brand affinity than passive TV ads
• 10:26 – Scaling past custom build friction with EA's integrated ad platform
• 11:20 – Utilizing unlicensed environments (EA IP) for non-endemic brands
• 13:05 – Lowering price entry points with geotargeting and short flight dates

Standardized measurement and the Domino's mid-game test. To solve the measurement bottleneck in console advertising, EA partnered with the IAB to establish standardized impression reporting across games. Beyond standardized impressions, EA measures mid-funnel engagement—such as jersey equips, matches played, brand lift studies, and social sentiment. In a standout direct-response activation, Domino's messaged competitive FC players on Friday nights with free pizza codes mid-game, allowing the QSR brand to track direct redemption rates, existing customer usage, and net-new customer acquisition.

• 14:14 – Standardizing console ad impression measurement in partnership with the IAB
• 15:30 – Case study: How Domino's drove direct conversions with mid-game free pizza codes
• 16:34 – Platform launch at Cannes Lions and what's ahead for console ads in the next 18–24 months

Connect with Alexander Dao on LinkedIn · EA Advertising

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Tim sits down with Nana Kofi Amoh, creator of Amoh Sports Media and AD in activation at Omnicom Media Group, to break down the rapidly shifting business of local sports broadcast rights, app consolidation, and how advertisers should navigate regional sports inventory. Recorded on State of Streaming.

The RSN model isn't dying — it's evolving: Why DAZN, EverPass, and app consolidation are reshaping local rights.

Local regional sports networks are shifting away from traditional cable packages toward direct-to-consumer apps and aggregated streaming platforms. Major moves—like DAZN acquiring EverPass to secure commercial bar and restaurant distribution, or channels like Gotham Sports transitioning to DAZN for the 2026–2027 season—highlight a broader push toward centralized sports destinations. Meanwhile, teams in smaller markets (such as St. Louis, Tampa Bay, and Miami) are navigating rights shifts that force fans to rethink how and where they access their favorite games.

• 0:45 – How app consolidation and DAZN's takeover of commercial venue distribution are reshaping local sports
• 2:53 – From Sinclair and Spectrum to Omnicom: Nana's path into programmatic media and founding Amoh Sports Media
• 5:26 – RSN evolution, DAZN's Gotham Sports deal, and the rights dilemma for small-market MLB, NBA, and NHL teams

Audience-first over broad targeting: Tapping into non-biased, highly passionate regional fanbases.

Live sports offer an environment driven by raw emotion, unscripted outcomes, and authentic regional engagement. Even when a franchise struggles on the field—such as the Pittsburgh Pirates—networks like SportsNet Pittsburgh generate strong ad revenue because local fandom remains deeply committed. Instead of applying broad demographic targeting, smart advertisers focus on where audience interest circles overlap, prioritizing regional nuances, multi-screen viewing habits, and personalities over traditional intellectual property.

• 7:47 – Why sports advertising provides non-biased engagement and brand safety for advertisers
• 8:49 – The Pittsburgh Pirates case study: Maintaining strong ad revenue despite fan discontent
• 9:57 – Moving beyond broad demographics: Prioritizing audience culture, multi-screen habits, and personalities over IP

The programmatic measurement dilemma: Balancing immediate conversion with long-tail brand awareness.

Evaluating the exact business outcome of a programmatic sports ad is challenging when fans stream games while simultaneously engaging with secondary devices. Exposure during a live broadcast may not drive an immediate transaction—such as buying a vehicle or shopping at Walmart right away—but high-impact live inventory builds lasting top-of-mind brand equity. Media buyers must look past immediate 90-day conversion metrics and adopt a patient, long-term equity mindset when evaluating sports inventory.

• 11:26 – Casting wide nets vs. specific targeting in programmatic sports buying
• 14:43 – Building lasting top-of-mind brand equity vs. expecting immediate transactional outcomes
• 16:10 – The 21-year Ogilvy lesson on auto brand positioning and consumer patience

Commercial co-viewing, $1,500 streaming bills, and the rise of niche live sports inventory.

With annual sports streaming costs reaching $1,200 to $1,500 for consumers, platform fragmentation is accelerating industry consolidation. DAZN's acquisition of EverPass addresses a critical co-viewing challenge by securing distribution in commercial venues like bars and restaurants, while platforms like Fubo integrate regional college networks and emerging properties like the Team Boxing League. These emerging leagues expand available live ad inventory while offering streaming platforms net-new subscriber segments.

• 16:53 – DAZN acquiring EverPass Media to control live sports distribution in commercial venues
• 19:19 – Managing $1,500 annual streaming costs, app fatigue, and network consolidation
• 20:20 – How emerging leagues (Team Boxing League, ACC/SEC networks on Fubo) expand live ad inventory

Connect with Nana Kofi Amoh on LinkedIn · Amoh Sports Media

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Tim sits down with cloud and media experts Rahul Bhatia and Hemant Soni for a special panel comparing how cloud architecture, AI, and regulation are shaping the future of streaming television on both sides of the Atlantic. Recorded on State of Streaming.

Commercial engine vs. public core: Why the US is built to monetize while the UK is built to balance.

The US streaming model is driven by private capital, aggressive monetization, and high-scale subscription plus ad-supported tiers. In contrast, the UK market is anchored by public service broadcasters like the BBC and ITV, operating under strict regulations and public funding. While US platforms compete heavily on first-party data and sports monetization, the UK balances a commercial ad engine on top of a publicly mandated service core.

• 2:30 – The UK's public-sector-driven streaming market vs. US private equity funding
• 3:14 – Built to monetize vs. built to balance: How US and UK incentive structures diverge
• 4:21 – Why UK streaming operates as a commercial engine on top of a public core

Cloud architecture at scale: Designing for massive traffic spikes and regulatory exit strategies.

Building streaming infrastructure isn't about average usage—it's about designing for extreme traffic spikes, such as major live sports broadcasts. US giants leverage public cloud and serverless architectures to scale effortlessly without owning physical servers. Meanwhile, UK operators must navigate heavy regulatory requirements like GDPR and mandatory cloud exit strategies, making infrastructure decisions as much about compliance as performance.

• 5:44 – Designing for live traffic spikes: Why Netflix and Prime Video run on public cloud
• 6:24 – UK cloud regulations, mandatory exit strategies, and navigating GDPR

The AI shift: From backend forecasting and 114-minute AI movies to agentic ad tech.

AI is moving rapidly from backend revenue forecasting and scene rendering into interactive ad experiences. On the consumer side, tools like Higgsfield Cinema Studio are generating entire feature-length films like Cully Hill Boys, complete with prompt instructions. On the monetization side, Netflix is leveraging recommendation data across 250 million ad-supported viewers to deploy interactive mid-roll ads, QR codes, and dynamic pause screens.

• 7:41 – How AI forecasting tools replace spreadsheets to project multi-year growth
• 9:18 – The Coley Hill Boys case study: Full-length AI-generated filmmaking
• 12:23 – Netflix's 250M ad-tier milestone and the rise of interactive mid-roll ads
• 15:12 – Agentic AI in action: AWS Bedrock Agents and live production automation

The 3-to-5 year outlook: Agentic campaign operators, privacy-first ads, and the coming storage bill.

AI is evolving from a creative tool into an active operator within the advertising ecosystem, capable of placing ads, managing budgets, and optimizing campaigns automatically. In the US, dynamic shopping data is driving hyper-personalized ads, whereas the UK's privacy-first regulations focus AI on content-contextual matching. As streaming catalogs expand, platforms may soon face massive infrastructure costs, making cloud storage the next big fee passed onto consumers.

• 17:27 – Is Netflix a tech company? Agentic AI and backend database investments
• 18:50 – Amazon's Dynamic TV Creative and shopping data-driven ad switching
• 20:44 – Why edge computing and cloud storage could become streaming's next paid fee
• 22:48 – US vs. UK AI strategy: Ads smarter with user data vs. context and privacy-first consent

Connect with Hemant Soni on LinkedIn · Rahul Bhatia on LinkedIn

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim sits down with Joe Franzetta, Head of Sports at Roku, to map out how Roku is solving sports discoverability, unifying fragmented streaming rights, and turning smart TV home screens into interactive fan hubs. They explore a 21-year-old prediction about interactive TV, how Roku City brings live stadium energy home, and why centralized sports zones are driving real engagement for major leagues.

From 21-year-old soap opera predictions to the front door of modern streaming.

Over two decades ago, Joe envisioned a world where television viewers could use their remote control to click on a couch or dress inside a soap opera and purchase it in real time. While technology was ahead of execution back then, streaming television has finally caught up. Today, sports serve as the ideal home for interactive viewer engagement because they command the largest, most captive audiences. To power this experience, Roku operates on two levels: as a platform OS acting as the front door to over 100 million households, and as a service via The Roku Channel offering free, ad-supported content.

• 0:00 – Looking back at a 21-year-old prediction about soap operas and interactive TV
• 1:25 – Why live sports are the ultimate home for interactive viewer engagement
• 2:10 – Roku as a platform OS vs. Roku as a first-party service

Bringing Grayson Stadium to Roku City: How the Savannah Bananas built a fan-first destination.

To recreate the energy of a live game for fans at home, Roku teamed up with the Savannah Bananas for a unique platform-level integration. They placed a clickable Grayson Stadium right inside the iconic Roku City screensaver. Hitting the remote's "up" button enters viewers into a virtual stadium greeted by founder Jesse Cole, which leads directly into the Banana Ball Zone—a dedicated hub aggregating live games across all distribution partners alongside VOD clips and exclusive content.

• 4:15 – The Savannah Bananas partnership: taking Broadway-style baseball on the road
• 5:40 – Placing Grayson Stadium inside Roku City as an interactive, clickable feature
• 7:10 – Solving fragmentation: How the Banana Ball Zone aggregates live games across all distribution partners

Solving rights fragmentation with Roku Sports Zones and fan personalization.

As sports rights split across four, five, or six different streaming platforms, viewer friction has reached an all-time high. Roku’s North Star solution is the Sports Zone—a centralized hub on the platform that aggregates live broadcasts by sport, provider, and league (including the NFL, NBA, MLB, WNBA, and NWSL). By combining explicit signals (fans picking their favorite teams) with implicit viewing signals, Roku serves personalized content feeds while leveraging the tribal nature of sports fandom.

• 8:45 – The North Star thesis: centralizing sports content across fragmented rights holders
• 10:30 – Building dedicated branded hubs for the NFL, NBA, MLB, WNBA, and NWSL
• 12:15 – How explicit fan choices and implicit viewing signals power personalization

Reimagining RSNs with FAST channels and expanding the playbook globally.

Regional sports networks were built for traditional cable, but digital streaming opens up new hybrid models. By offering free game unlocks on FAST outlets like the Roku Sports Channel paired with interactive click-to-subscribe remote prompts, leagues can convert local viewers into paid subscribers. Beyond North America, Roku is taking this sports hub playbook international across Latin America, Europe, and the UK, driving record streaming engagement during global tentpole events like the World Cup.

• 14:10 – The future of RSNs: hybrid distribution, FAST unlocks, and click-to-subscribe remotes
• 16:05 – T-commerce, ticket sales, and building digital fan communities around team rivalries
• 17:35 – International expansion: driving record World Cup streaming engagement across seven global territories

Connect with Joe Franzetta on LinkedIn · Roku

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim Rowe sits down with Moe Chughtai, Global Vice President at MiQ, to untangle the fragmented state of modern television and how advertisers can responsibly measure multi-channel media allocation. The episode dives into the evolution of "Total TV," bridging the gap between walled gardens and the open web, and why true measurement requires looking beyond platform-provided metrics.

The definition of TV is now entirely generational.

What constitutes "TV" completely changes depending on who holds the remote. For older generations, it remains the traditional cable box, but for Millennials, it is streaming-first, and for Gen Z, TV means YouTube and social video before anything else. Advertising must follow the consumer, meaning buyers have to operate across multiple ecosystems—often needing at least three different platforms to achieve true CTV scale.

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• 01:27 – How MiQ’s AI tech enables traders to run 45 campaigns a month compared to the agency average of five
• 02:50 – Why getting CTV scale requires buying across at least three platforms, including walled gardens like Amazon and Google
• 07:21 – The "Total TV" framework and how younger demographics view short-form social video as primary entertainment

Platform-graded measurement is creating massive blind spots.

If an advertiser relies solely on a buying platform to measure its own success, the numbers will inevitably overstate performance and claim overlapping conversions. True measurement cannot be graded by the platform selling the media. Advertisers need to elevate their data strategy above individual platforms to identify overlap, measure cross-channel frequency, and spot wasted ad spend across both the open web and streaming investments.

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• 10:30 – How overlaying location data with CTV and social investments helps national brands eliminate local media wastage
• 13:17 – Why relying on platform-reported performance leads to overcounted conversions and critical business blind spots
• 13:50 – The shift toward independent measurement partners and digital MMM solutions to track true cross-channel performance

Walled gardens are finally lowering their defenses.

After years of locking down data in response to privacy regulations and competitive fears, the major walled gardens are starting to open up. Platforms are realizing that to secure ad dollars, they must allow marketers to bring their own data in and take actionable signals out. With clean rooms and integrated measurement providers gaining traction, the binary battle between the open web and walled gardens is turning into a collaborative spectrum.

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• 15:23 – How Google’s Ads Data Hub and Meta’s clean rooms are signaling a shift toward more open data sharing
• 16:06 – Why YouTube remains the dominant global video player, with 60% of MiQ's YouTube ads running on the big screen
• 18:23 – Moe's two-year prediction on walled gardens allowing more data in and out to satisfy marketer demand

Connect with Moe Chughtai on LinkedIn · MiQ

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim sits down with Keith Bedford, GM of EMEA at Wurl, to map the infrastructure gaps standing between live sports and FAST monetization — and what Wurl is building to close them. Recorded ahead of Sportel and Mipcom, with a Part Two already locked in.

Live sports on FAST went from less than 3% of viewing to an entire content category in <12 months.

A year ago, live sports made up less than 3% of all FAST viewing compared to nearly 20% on traditional television. That gap is closing fast — Man City launched a channel going live on match days, UEFA landed on Tubi with highlights and women's Champions League content, the Bundesliga kept a Friday night game for Samsung TV Plus while selling Saturday rights to Sky. The rights model is diversifying. The platforms are filling up. The ad infrastructure hasn't caught up yet.

• 1:37 – Man City's live match day channel and why it's unprecedented in the UK market
• 2:10 – UEFA on Tubi: highlights, women's Champions League, and what rights they kept
• 4:48 – The Bundesliga case study: Saturday rights to Sky, Friday nights to Samsung TV Plus

The programmatic problem? If nobody knows it's live, nobody bids like it's live.

In a programmatic bid stream, a live Champions League match and a three-year-old highlights reel look identical without metadata. The CPM is the same. The opportunity isn't captured. Wurl has spent most of the year building a live event API that pre-sends event IDs, metadata, and timing into the bid stream — essentially a sports TV guide for media buyers and planners that tells the market what's live, when, and what content surrounds it. It's not live yet. But it's close.

• 7:57 – Why FAST ad monetization is still a mixture of pre-sold sponsorships and programmatic
• 9:30 – Why walled garden OEM data creates fragmentation for advertisers trying to reach across platforms
• 16:23 – Wurl's live event API: pre-sending event IDs and metadata so planners can actually plan against it

Someone still has to press the ad button - what about AI?

All this technology and AI, and the best way to insert an ad break into a live sports stream is still a human being pressing a button in real time. Wurl uses AI to model when game breaks should happen, but the final call is manual — because if it's live and the game overruns, an automated system gets it wrong. The investment they've made is in making that human intervention smarter, faster, and more frequent so more ad slots get filled at better rates.

• 12:50 – What Wurl does: playout, channel distribution, and AdPool across every major platform
• 14:22 – Why live ad insertion still requires a human in the loop
• 15:10 – How Wurl's ad break model creates more inventory and better metadata in the same workflow

The three reasons FAST live sports channels fail: the TV, the home screen, and the cross-marketing.

Keith's honest diagnosis of why good content still doesn't find its audience. First: consumers don't know the free channels exist when they buy the TV. Second: if the content isn't on the home screen, it might as well not exist — and getting home screen placement requires an active marketing strategy with the platform. Third: almost nobody is cross-marketing their FAST channel across social, YouTube, and Instagram, which is the only place to find the audiences who aren't already looking. Two tiers exist: brands that understand marketing, and brands that ignore it entirely. There's no middle.

• 19:39 – Why consumers don't know they have 300 free channels when they buy a new TV
• 20:30 – Why home screen placement requires an active strategy, not just distribution
• 22:01 – Why cross-platform marketing is the missing piece for almost every FAST sports channel

Connect with Keith Bedford on LinkedIn · Wurl

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim Rowe sits down with David Nyurenberg, SVP of Digital at InterMedia Advertising, days before the Ad Exchanger Awards Gala at Programmatic I/O — where three of InterMedia's projects landed five finalist nominations. The episode unpacks all three: closing the conversion loop on direct publisher buys, privacy-safe show-level targeting at scale, and what happens to performance when you separate good news from bad news using AI.

Direct publisher buys in CTV have been dumb buys. That just changed.

More advertisers buy direct-to-publisher in CTV than the industry realizes — better rates, no middleman fees, upfront commitments, JBP spend requirements. But the tradeoff has always been measurement. Publishers had no visibility into which slices of their inventory were driving conversions, which meant they couldn't optimize. The buy either worked or it didn't — a roll of the dice on CPMs that aren't cheap. InterMedia closed that loop with Tubi, NBCU, and Paramount by placing publisher pixels and feeding conversion data back in real time. All three publisher tactics became the top-performing placements across an entire major buy.

• 3:09 – Why direct CTV buys have historically been "dumb buys" — and why that matters at scale
• 6:53 – Why DTC and mid-market brands are existential for legacy CTV publishers competing with Meta and Google
• 9:04 – The result: Tubi, NBCU, and Paramount tactics outperformed every other tactic across the entire buy

Show-level targeting without knowing the show name. Privacy-safe and scalable.

David has been banging the drum on show-level transparency for years — because you can't optimize toward content that drives performance if you can't identify the content. The first solution used metadata matching: zip code, time of day, channel, and network cross-referenced against an airings table to deduce what show was on and bid accordingly. It worked. It didn't scale. Pier 39's content ID solution hit scale — assigning a unique ID to every show without revealing the title, then tying that ID to conversion data so the algorithm knows what to buy more of. You give up the show name. You get the performance signal.

• 12:20 – Why show-level transparency is the gap holding CTV back as a true performance channel
• 13:14 – The first approach: metadata matching via zip code, time, channel, and Grayston airings tables
• 15:07 – The Pier 39 solution: random content IDs tied to conversions, scaled through Pontiac Intelligence

Good news outperforms bad news. The data is now in.

News is efficient and it converts — older audiences, disposable income, high engagement. But many advertisers still won't buy news on CTV because brand safety enforcement is harder than in display: no keywords, just moving sound and image. Anokey AI's contextual technology solved it by segmenting news into positive and negative sentiment in real time. InterMedia ran a scientific split — positive news versus negative news versus all news bundled together, with deduplicated audiences and a control line. Positive news outperformed both the negative-only line and the everything line on a cost-per-lead basis. Good news is good for your bottom line.

• 16:52 – Why news performs in CTV — and why most advertisers still won't buy it
• 17:21 – How Anokey AI segments local news by sentiment in real time on CTV
• 19:00 – The result: positive news sentiment outperformed negative news and the control line

Connect with David Nyurenberg on LinkedIn · InterMedia Advertising

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

📊 Read the MRI-Simmons Video Podcast Report: mrisimmons.com

Tim sits down with Emily Williams, Consumer Expert at MRI-Simmons, for a return visit built around fresh data from their annual podcast study — 10,000 US podcast consumers surveyed, weighted and projected to the total US audience. The topic: why the definition of a podcast is breaking down, why that's actually good news, and what the numbers say about where streaming, podcasting, and creator content are all converging.

Only 36% of podcast consumers still define a podcast as audio-only. In 2021, that number was over 60%.
The format-first definition of podcasting is collapsing — and Emily's data shows it happening faster than anyone expected. Today 13% of podcast consumers define a podcast as a video program on an app. Another 8% — roughly 7 million active podcast consumers — say they're not even sure how to define a podcast anymore. Emily's read: podcasting isn't losing its identity. It's becoming bigger than the format that originally created it.

• 1:26 – How MRI-Simmons surveys 10,000 US podcast consumers annually and what the study measures
• 3:00 – How the definition of a podcast has shifted: from audio-first to format-agnostic
• 4:47 – The 8% who actively consume podcasts but can't define what they're consuming

96% of podcast consumers still listen to audio. 89% watch video. Video isn't replacing audio — it's adding to it.
The winner-versus-loser framing the industry keeps reaching for doesn't match the data. Nearly three-quarters of podcast consumers — 74% — say video is an enhancement to audio, not a replacement. Two-thirds say they prefer to watch video when it's offered. And 53% say that when they're watching a video podcast, they ignore the video and just listen anyway. The availability of video matters more to consumers than the constant visual attention. They want the option. They don't always use it.

• 9:00 – Why video and audio are complementary formats, not competing ones
• 10:20 – Why 53% of video podcast viewers ignore the video while listening
• 11:30 – The multi-platform consumer: TV at home, audio in the car, clip on Instagram at night

Social media clips have officially replaced word of mouth as the #1 way people discover podcasts.
Up until 2024, the number one podcast discovery mechanism was a friend or colleague recommending a show. Starting in 2024, social media surpassed verbal recommendations. Today 44% of podcast consumers discover shows through social media — ahead of recommendations, app directories, online searches, and advertising. A two-hour episode generates dozens of short clips. Those clips circulate on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. The show finds the consumer before the consumer finds the show.

• 18:07 – How social media surpassed word of mouth as the #1 podcast discovery channel in 2024
• 18:30 – Why video creates the short-clip discovery engine that audio alone never could
• 19:45 – Why consumers discover the clip before they discover the podcast — and why that's lower friction

23 million consumers say podcast time is replacing streaming time. Netflix is paying attention.
Podcasts are not just another content category for streaming platforms — they are increasingly a competitor for the same hours. 23 million consumers say their podcast time is replacing video streaming. Another 32 million say it's replacing traditional live TV. Nearly 60% of podcast consumers say they find podcasts more engaging than TV. And 70% say they actively seek out other content from publishers once they find a program they like — TV shows, movies, live events, merchandise. That's not passive media consumption. That's fandom. That's why Netflix and YouTube are in a bidding war for creator franchises.

• 12:54 – Why streaming platforms see podcasts as a competitor for attention, not just a content category
• 13:30 – Why 55% of podcast consumers — about 50 million people — go to YouTube for podcasts
• 16:21 – Why streaming services acquiring podcasts are buying loyal audiences, trusted creators, and communities

By 2031, we'll stop asking whether something is a podcast or a TV show. We'll just ask whether it has an audience.
Emily's five-year prediction: the podcast-versus-TV distinction disappears. The relevant distinction becomes scripted versus unscripted. The future media landscape will be organized around creators, communities, and interests — not formats. Brands that create belonging and give audiences reasons to return will win. The format will be irrelevant.

• 21:19 – Emily's 2031 prediction: the end of the podcast-versus-TV conversation
• 21:45 – Why scripted vs. unscripted is the distinction that actually matters to consumers
• 22:10 – Why the future asks "does it have an audience?" not "is it a podcast or a TV show?"

📊 Read the MRI-Simmons Podcast Study highlights deck — free: mrisimmons.com
Connect with Emily Williams on LinkedIn · MRI-Simmons

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim sits down with Pat Taggart, filmmaker and founder of Sky Blue Creative, to discuss his new documentary No One Died: The Wing Bowl Story — the 26-year history of Philadelphia's most chaotic winter tradition, and what self-distributing an independent film in today's streaming market actually looks like when the major players come calling with contracts designed to take everything.

A radio joke in 1993. 30,000 people in an arena by the end.

Al Morganti threw out a throwaway comment on the air — the Eagles are never going to the Super Bowl, let's have a chicken wing-eating contest instead. Two guys at a folding table in the lobby of a Ritz-Carlton-caliber hotel. Two hundred drunk Philadelphians showed up. The hotel told them never to come back. The next year, 700 people showed up in an ice storm to watch year two at Mike Schmidt's bar on Market Street. It grew from there.

• 3:01 – How a passing comment on Philadelphia sports talk radio became a 26-year tradition
• 4:15 – Year one: a folding table at a hotel, 200 hooligans, and a horrified management team
• 5:39 – What the Florida Film Festival reviewer called "strangely heartfelt" — and why they were right

For 364 days a year, the participants were anonymous.

For one day, 30,000 people knew their name.

Landscapers, security guards, plumbers, mailmen. Wing Bowl gave regular people a moment that almost nobody gets — walking into a packed arena with 30,000 people on their feet screaming for them. The community that formed around it was a brotherhood and sisterhood that reunited every year. The chaos on the surface was real. So was everything underneath it.

• 5:54 – Why Wing Bowl was as much about community as it was about spectacle
• 6:46 – How Pat approached the tonal shift from harmless joke to massive cultural event
• 17:41 – The universal story: the little guy getting their shine, freedom of expression, a runaway train

A truck exploded in the parking lot. A man was attacked by dogs carrying grilled cheese. Someone ate three candles.

The behind-the-scenes stories that didn't make the final cut are as good as the ones that did. Mitch Williams — the relief pitcher famous for giving up the World Series-winning home run to Joe Carter — parked his truck over smoldering tailgate embers and it blew up. A Wing Bowl qualifier was attacked by stray dogs on his walk to the studio because they smelled the grilled cheese in his backpack. One contestant's qualifying stunt was eating actual wax candles. Pat had 40 characters in the film and says he could have made another film with 100 more.

• 14:59 – The Mitch Williams truck explosion story that didn't make the cut
• 15:30 – The grilled cheese dog attack that almost got a guy disqualified
• 16:10 – The candle eater and the philosophy of finding the best collection of characters possible

Two of the largest production companies on the planet made offers. Pat walked away from both.

During COVID, major streamers were buying documentaries at massive multiples — seven figures for content that wasn't even exceptional, just available. The pendulum has swung hard in the other direction: $300,000 documentaries now selling for $30,000 because filmmakers have no leverage. Two major production companies approached Pat about Wing Bowl. Their contracts would have removed Pat as director, removed the producer, severed all financial and name attachment, and given them full narrative control. Pat said take it out of the contract. They said that's not our intention. He walked.

• 19:23 – Why the major streamers are now buying $300K documentaries for $30K
• 19:48 – What the production company contracts actually said — and why Pat walked
• 20:30 – The self-distribution decision: aggregator over distributor, creative control over upfront money

Self-distribution is more expensive upfront. It's also the only way to keep the film you made.

Pat went through an aggregator instead of a traditional distributor to get the film on Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube. It cost more out of pocket. But the film that's on those platforms is the film he intended to make, and he's still attached to it by name and financially. His wife's cousin asked if it was on Fandango. It isn't. Discoverability in a world of infinite shelves is the next problem — and it's the same problem every content creator faces.

• 18:53 – Why Pat passed on Fandango and chose to stay on three major platforms
• 19:11 – The discoverability problem: you have to be in all the stores, on all the shelves
• 20:30 – What self-distribution via aggregator actually costs and what it protects

Connect with Pat Taggart on LinkedIn · pat@skybluecreative.com · https://wingbowlmovie.com/

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Tim sits down with Shawne Merriman, three-time Pro Bowler and CEO of Lights Out Sports TV, to trace the journey from defensive end to streaming architect — and unpack the 5G broadcast technology he's been quietly building for a year that could fundamentally change the economics of live sports delivery.

From the field to the production truck to the boardroom — how Shawne was taking notes the whole time.

Shawne Merriman started asking camera operators questions during pregame warmups in San Diego. He went from NFL AM at 3 a.m. — the broadcast boot camp that became Good Morning Football — to Fox Sports, ESPN, the WWE Network, and MMA promotion. By the time he launched Lights Out Extreme Fighting on Fox Sports Regionals in the same timeslot UFC vacated, he had already spent years picking up intel at Fubo's offices, sitting in Pluto's LA suite when they had 12 employees, and watching the streaming industry build itself from the inside.

• 2:39 – Why Shawne was asking camera operators questions during pregame warmups
• 4:15 – NFL AM: the 3 a.m. broadcast boot camp that became Good Morning Football
• 6:14 – Pitching Lights Out Extreme Fighting to Fox Sports the day UFC left — and landing it

Programmatic alone doesn't work unless you're Pluto. Direct ad sales is how you build a real business.

FAST looked promising — until Shawne ran the numbers. Programmatic revenue doesn't scale for a sports property unless you're already at Pluto-level monthly actives. The model that actually works: direct-sold ads anchored by live sports, with enough complementary content on the platform to create a trickle-down viewing effect when the game ends. It's the same math Paramount+ is running with the NFL and Landman. Shawne's running a version of it with LXF, Glory Kickboxing, World Poker Tour, and high school football.

• 9:17 – How Shawne learned the FAST business from the inside — including what programmatic actually pays
• 18:32 – Why direct ad sales is the only way to meaningfully grow revenue for a live sports property
• 20:47 – The trickle-down effect: why live sports is the top of the funnel, not the whole funnel

One signal to a million people. The 5G broadcast technology that could change live sports economics.

The fundamental cost problem in live sports streaming: one million concurrent viewers means one million simultaneous CDN signals. Costs scale linearly with audience. Shawne has spent the last year and a half embedded with a company building 5G broadcast technology that flips that model — one signal delivered to millions via low-power tower infrastructure, with no congestion, no dropout, and built-in compatibility with the new chipsets coming to mobile devices. The announcement hasn't been made yet. But the math is already solved.

• 13:51 – Why CDN costs are the live sports streaming industry's biggest unspoken problem
• 14:54 – The 5G broadcast technology: one signal to millions, no congestion, no dropout
• 15:26 – How new mobile chipsets unlock billions of addressable devices as 6G comes online

DTC wins. The platforms that figure it out first take the long game.

Shawne called it three to four years ago: the streaming services that win long term are the ones that solve direct-to-consumer. Not because of price — most consumers will absorb a couple extra dollars. Because of experience. The navigational friction of jumping between Netflix, Paramount+, ESPN, and Hulu is the real complaint. Whoever solves the bridge — seamless access, unified data, direct fan engagement — owns the next decade.

• 11:00 – Why DTC is the only long-term winning strategy in streaming distribution
• 15:52 – How the closed network model lets platforms push products and rewards directly to viewers
• 17:06 – The math problem streaming is now in: responsible scaling, not growth at all costs

How high school football is paving the way for high school sports streaming.

St. Francis vs. IMG Academy. Shawne has exclusive broadcast rights, drone production planned, fan engagement built in, and conversations underway with multiple networks and platforms. He produced the East-West Shrine Bowl practices live for the first time in the event's 100-year history. High school sports is the next frontier — and he's building the production infrastructure for it.

• 21:37 – The St. Francis vs. IMG Academy game: why Shawne expects it to be the most watched high school football game in the country
• 22:00 – Fan engagement as the core production principle: if fans feel connected, viewers follow
• 22:30 – The East-West Shrine Bowl: 100-year-old event, first-ever live stream practices

Connect with Shawne Merriman on LinkedIn · @ShawneMerriman on all platforms · Lights Out Sports TV

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Tim sits down with Mark Stenberg, Senior Media Reporter at Adweek, to unpack the real ripple effects of Meta's $17 billion teen settlement — what it actually means for media buyers, whether YouTube gets dragged into the same restrictions, where youth advertising budgets go if mobile supply shrinks, and why the microdrama format might be the most interesting disruption nobody is talking about yet.

$18 billion sounds like a reckoning but it's only $1.2 billion a year for a company that made $60 billion last quarter.

The coalition of state attorneys general asked for $200 billion. They settled for $12 billion cash plus a conditional $5 billion — spread over ten years. Meta's stock went up. The more interesting part isn't the number. It's the conditions: reduced notifications during school hours, dark mode after midnight, a two-hour daily usage cap for teens. And the conditional $5 billion only triggers if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap agree to implement the same restrictions — Meta's lawyers took hostages on the way out.

• 1:47 – The settlement breakdown: $12B certain, $5B conditional, $1B to the Texas AG
• 2:44 – The teen restrictions: notifications, dark mode, usage caps
• 7:09 – Why Meta's legal strategy was "if we're going down, we're all going down"

The media buy remains unchanged.
By and large, the answer from agencies is: we're establishing benchmarks and watching the next 6-12 months. The demographic affected is less than 1% of Meta's revenue. Teens don't have the disposable income of any other demographic. But if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap all get pulled into the same restrictions — and the entire social ecosystem adopts teen safeguards simultaneously — that's a different conversation entirely. The brands paying attention are the ones in fast food, gaming, and fashion.

• 3:35 – What media buyers actually said: benchmarks, not budget shifts
• 5:00 – Why less than 1% of Meta's revenue comes from this demographic
• 6:05 – Australia's under-16 social media ban and the broader legislative trajectory

YouTube is different but those differences are disappearing.
YouTube has never really been a social media company — it lacks the social graph, it's consumed more like television, and it's been more proactive on parental controls. But Instagram is launching Instagram TV. Microdramas are making streaming look like social. The distinctions that protect YouTube today are eroding. Mark's read: YouTube voluntarily adopts some teen-friendly policies to avoid bad press, but doesn't end up looking exactly like Meta.

• 9:16 – The CPM gap between YouTube mobile and YouTube on the living room screen
• 10:26 – Why YouTube's distinctions from social media are continuing to disappear
• 12:00 – Why YouTube lacking a social graph is one of its biggest internal challenges

The biggest creators are acting like media companies.
YouTube is paying creators to not talk to Netflix. Jay Shetty. Tom Segura. The talent wars are accelerating — and Mark wrote the cover story on it. The biggest YouTube channels are functioning as standalone IP. Spotify is a dark horse. Fast platforms and institutional capital are getting involved. In 12 months, Spotify will have video, YouTube will have podcasts, Netflix will have music. The platform distinctions we have today won't exist.

• 13:01 – Why YouTube is paying creators to stay off Netflix
• 13:36 – Mark's Adweek cover story: creators hitting an inflection point
• 15:00 – The talent wars: signing creators like unseen NBA prospects

Microdramas: the addictiveness of social scrolling plus the IP of Hollywood.
A company out of Tel Aviv is using AI to cut licensed Hollywood IP into five-minute, ten-clip highlight reels. A company out of Ukraine is building original IP for the format. The microdrama genre has been massive in China for years. Mark's thesis: if you combine mobile scrolling addiction with genuinely compelling short-form IP, that's a potential sea change — and the dominant player in that space hasn't emerged in the US yet.

• 16:17 – Why microdramas are the format Mark is most interested in right now
• 17:00 – The Tel Aviv company cutting Hollywood IP into bite-sized streaming
• 19:14 – Quibi was six years early. The format is now arriving on time.

📰 Read Mark's piece: What Meta's Teen Settlement Means for Media Buyers
More from Mark at Adweek: adweek.com/contributor/m

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Tim sits down with David Dembowski, Streaming TV Architect, to break down the business of live sports streaming through the lens of the Five D's — Digital, Data, Distribution, Discovery, and Delight — and why a 62-second streaming delay during the Super Bowl is more than an engineering inconvenience. It's a business problem that touches every one of them.

Why a 62-second delay isn't a tech problem but a failure in customer delight.
During Super Bowl 60, Stats Perform placed spotters inside Levi's Stadium and measured the gap between on-field action and on-screen delivery across every major platform. Streaming viewers waited up to 62 seconds. Peacock — the best-performing streaming platform — ran 48 seconds behind. Broadcast ran 19 seconds. When your most forward-facing digital platforms are creating a lag in the real-time experience, it shows up in the user experience, in sports betting, and in the ad product.

• 0:00 – The 62-second streaming delay stat from Super Bowl 60
• 1:39 – Why the gap between the game and the screen is a business problem across all five D's
• 19:08 – How latency directly impacts sports betting and prediction markets during live events

How The Five D's: Digital, Data, Distribution, Discovery, Delight drive Streaming TV Success
David's framework for how publishers need to think about their transition from broadcast to streaming-first businesses. Digital first means foundational infrastructure — not just putting content online. Data means addressability, reach and frequency, targeting and measurement. Distribution means meeting the consumer on the platform they prefer. Discovery means universal findability. And Delight means none of the first four matter if the experience fails the fan.

• 1:39 – The Five D's defined: why delight is the one that ties everything together
• 4:05 – What digital first actually means: foundational infrastructure, not surface-level streaming
• 5:04 – Why organizational structure is the number one challenge for traditional broadcasters going digital

Why Walled gardens are coming down — and Peacock distributing on YouTube is the proof.
For years, walled gardens meant social platforms. Now they mean content distribution channels. Peacock announcing distribution on YouTube is a generational shift — a legacy broadcaster meeting a younger audience where they actually live. David's read: organizations that understand the fundamental shift in consumption are tearing walls down. The ones that don't are watching Amazon double the NBA's national game count to 150 games and bring 30 new advertisers into sports who had never bought TV before.

• 10:47 – Why Peacock distributing on YouTube is a generational distribution bet
• 12:26 – How the NBA went from 75 to 150 national games by adding Amazon as a partner
• 16:14 – Who's winning in streaming: Amazon, Prime, and the Thursday Night Football model

Discovery is still broken.
Apple TV does a Friday night MLB doubleheader. If your team is on Apple TV that night, you have to subscribe on the spot to watch it. That's not a discovery problem — that's a discovery plus access problem. Universal discovery is the next challenge publishers need to solve, and Fox's acquisition of Roku is the most interesting move in that direction: an operating system with massive household penetration layered with content that can now be promoted and surfaced across it.

• 13:15 – Why universal discovery is the unsolved problem for sports streaming
• 14:09 – Apple TV's MLB model and why access barriers compound discovery problems
• 15:24 – The Fox/Roku acquisition as a discovery and distribution play

What is 'Social Appointment Viewing'?
Stadium seats are finite. Ticket prices are prohibitive. But the desire for shared viewing is growing — the World Cup proved it in neighborhoods, movie theaters, and bars globally. The relationship between live sports, sports betting, latency, and the dual-screen experience is the next convergence point David is watching closely.

• 17:58 – Watch parties and social appointment viewing as a growing trend
• 18:43 – The World Cup and Love Island as proof of concept for shared viewing experiences
• 19:08 – How latency becomes a critical problem when sports betting is on the second screen

Connect with David Dembowski on LinkedIn

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Tim sits down with Giovanni Galvez, from SyncWords, for a special webinar replay recorded live — including a real-time demo where SyncWords translated the State of Streaming broadcast into Spanish, French, and German simultaneously while the conversation was happening. The topic: how platforms are using live localization to reach the 80% of the world that doesn't speak English — and how much audience they're leaving on the table by not doing it.

Did you know that 80% of the world doesn't speak English? It's the viewership cliff your team missed.

Streaming platforms are spending billions on sports rights and then broadcasting those events in a language 80% of the world can't follow. SyncWords' data shows the drop-off happens fast — within the first few minutes of a stream, when a viewer realizes the audio isn't for them and bails to find another outlet. Language isn't a nice-to-have accessibility feature. It's a churn lever.

• 1:17 – Telemundo had to publish a correction to their first-round World Cup viewership data — and why language is the context
• 2:03 – Giovanni's origin story: growing up in Washington D.C. translating Knight Rider for his family in real time
• 12:07 – Where drop-off actually happens in a live stream and why language is a primary driver

Why is 'live localization' an entirely different technical problem than subtitling a pre-recorded show?

A live stream has to be ingested, transcribed, translated via LLM, formatted for broadcast-standard caption protocols (608, DVB, WebVTT), synchronized to the video, and delivered — in under a few seconds, in multiple languages simultaneously, with the emotional tone of the original speaker preserved. SyncWords has been solving this for over ten years, and Gio walked through every layer of the gap live on air.

• 3:28 – What SyncWords actually does: closed captioning, live translation, voice dubbing, and live sign language
• 5:33 – The technical gap: LLM output, broadcast codec standards, HLS delivery, synchronization
• 7:12 – Why live dubbing is interpretation, not translation — and why the synthetic voice has to carry the emotion

Jewelry TV launched a new Spanish-speaking market 24/7 without adding a new team - find out how.
One of SyncWords' clients runs a 24/7 English-language home shopping channel. SyncWords takes that live feed and delivers it in Spanish — subtitles and voice dubbing — in real time. The brand built a whole separate Spanish identity around it. The operational lift to enter a new market went from building a production team to pressing go. That's the ROI case: test a market with existing content before betting the farm on it.

• 9:07 – How Jewelry TV built a Spanish-language brand on top of an automated English feed
• 9:48 – Reaching a new market without new operational lift
• 10:50 – How WWE uses market-specific commentators for major markets — and why automation is the entry point for everyone else

76% of people prefer to shop and spend in their native language.
A California university added Chinese subtitles to its commencement live stream and saw viewer numbers spike — and announced they'd expand to more languages. A single house-of-worship event ran 80 simultaneous language outputs for the first time ever. The tier-one creator economy is just starting to apply this. When a Spanish-speaking viewer hears their favorite sport called in Spanish for the first time, they don't leave. They want to know what else they missed.

• 13:38 – Language as a churn lever: how localization keeps viewers engaged
• 14:17 – University commencements, house of worship, and the 80-language live event
• 15:21 – How The Chosen built global language communities using local scholars — and how SyncWords makes that available to anyone

The live demo: this podcast was being translated into Spanish, French, and German the entire time.
Gio revealed mid-episode that he had connected the State of Streaming live stream to SyncWords' system at the start of the session. The entire conversation was being translated and streamed in three languages simultaneously — without Tim knowing. The demo wasn't a setup. It was physics.

• 15:58 – Gio reveals the broadcast has been live-translating since the start
• 16:28 – Screen share: watching Tim speak German subtitles in real time
• 17:29 – What's coming at IBC Amsterdam: next-generation subtitle standards and one-click live translation for any language on earth

Connect with Giovanni Galvez on LinkedIn · SyncWords

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

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Read Josh's most recent piece on State of Streaming here 👈

Tim sits down with Josh Stein, Founder of Attention Capital, to unpack why capital markets keep mispricing attention, what makes an audience durable enough to finance, and why the creator economy is the next private credit boom — whether Wall Street knows it yet or not.

Some attention compounds. Some decays. The difference is what's financeable.
Josh spent the first decade of his career in investment banking at Bear Stearns and leveraged finance law at Cahill Gordon — then spent fifteen years applying those dark arts to media at Vice, Univision, and Guillermo del Toro's Murata Studios. The aha moment came early: help Dr. Phil build two New York Times number one bestsellers using the same infrastructure private equity uses to underwrite a cash-flowing asset. That's the thesis that became Attention Capital.

• 1:10 – From a speeding ticket outside Schenectady to pricing attention like an asset class
• 3:30 – Bear Stearns, leveraged buyouts, and what Wall Street taught Josh about building media businesses
• 6:00 – The pro bono moment that split the atom: finance discipline meets the creator economy

What makes an audience durable? They show up unpaid, unprompted, and predictably returning.
Most viewership is noise. Durable audience is the audience that comes back without being paid to, without being prompted by the algorithm — and does so predictably enough that you can model it. If you can model it, you can finance it. That's the entire framework in one sentence.

• 8:40 – What durable audience means and why most viewership doesn't qualify
• 9:32 – The difference between algorithmic traffic and a community that comes back regardless
• 10:42 – Why predictability is the bridge between audience and credit

AQS: the Attention Quality Score does for attention what Nielsen does for viewership.
Attention Capital's underwriting framework scores audience across three pillars — durability (does it return unpaid?), cohesion (is it a community or a collection of random people?), and conversion (does it reliably generate cash?). It's not analytics. It's underwriting. The question isn't what happened — it's whether Attention Capital gets paid back.

• 11:13 – How AQS differs from Nielsen: underwriting vs. analytics
• 12:57 – The four-quadrant framework: deterministic, stochastic, qualitative, quantitative
• 13:06 – Why these aren't venture bets — they're SMEs with three to five years of operating history

The capital is for the hoodie company. And for getting off the hamster wheel.
A creator with a durable audience and a brand deal is one missed deadline away from a crisis. The capital Attention Capital deploys isn't for the content — it's for the third and fourth lines of business the audience can support: the studio, the podcast, the merch line, the holding company spine that transforms Tim Rowe into Tim Rowe's company. That's the exit multiple inflection. That's the point.

• 15:03 – How the capital conversation actually starts: a time problem, not a money problem
• 16:00 – Growth capital for the third line of business and professionalizing the org
• 23:22 – Why a creator with three to five years of operating history is a boring, high-margin SME that can't walk into Chase

TKO/WWE quit trying to be Netflix and made $2B.
Building and maintaining a streaming platform is a pie-eating contest — win and your prize is more pie, more capex, more customer service, more churn. TKO solved it by owning what they're best at and selling the rights four ways: Netflix gets appointment viewing, NBCU gets cord-cutter repellent, ESPN gets anchor events, Paramount+ gets live differentiation. Brilliant business. Simple business. $2B in twelve months.

• 17:55 – Why TKO's distribution strategy is a masterclass in IP, audience, and distribution
• 18:30 – What streaming services each got from the WWE deal and why it works for all four
• 20:15 – Does the Paramount/WBD deal close? Josh's read.

YouTube-native filmmakers are building durable audiences that translate to the box office.
Talk to Me. Backrooms. Obsession. These aren't anomalies — they're physics. Build a durable audience around a specific type of content, then serve it to them in a new window. They show up. Josh's thesis: horror is the easy proof of concept. The really interesting test is when this model slips into genres that aren't so on the nose.

• 20:54 – Why film is where Josh is most excited about the Attention Capital thesis
• 21:06 – Talk to Me, Backrooms, Obsession: why YouTube-to-theatrical isn't a fluke
• 22:30 – What happens when this model moves beyond horror into other genres

Connect with Josh Stein on LinkedIn · Attention Capital on Substack

Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to https://mystreamingvalue.com to compare CTV home screens and find out which spaces are worth the most. You’ll even learn exactly why Fox was willing to pay $22 billion for Roku. Stop guessing and start scaling—visit https://mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim sits down with Michael Beach, author of Screen Wars and Publisher of State of the Screens, to work through convergent TV, why local advertising holds the keys to the next billion-dollar streaming exit, what $100 CPMs actually look like in the math, and why the consumer settled the YouTube-is-TV debate years ago.

📰 Read Michael's piece on What Changes as YouTube becomes TV first here
📖 Get the book Screen Wars on Amazon

The next billion-dollar streaming exit will come from the burbs.

Every major exit in ad tech over the last decade — Vibe, Simplifi, Madhive — has one thing in common: they weren't chasing the top 200 national brands. They were serving local and niche advertisers in markets that nobody else bothered to build for. Traditional TV gets 80% of its revenue from its top 100 advertisers. Facebook built one of the highest-margin ad products in history by going the opposite direction — 10 million smaller advertisers. The math is clear. The industry just keeps ignoring it.

• 1:13 – Why the best ad tech exits come from local and niche, not national high-profile brands
• 3:21 – Why 190 of 210 media markets get no measurement and no product built for them
• 3:49 – How Cross Screen Media was built for the markets everyone else ignored

YouTube is TV. The consumer settled that debate. What's next?

Michael writes about YouTube being TV and people lose their minds. But ask a kid. Ask yourself what you default to when you can't find anything on the app you're paying for. YouTube already commands a third of total TV time — and Michael thinks it can reach the ceiling NBC, ABC, and CBS shared in the broadcast era. The ad product hasn't caught up yet. That's not a red flag. That's the runway.

• 9:38 – Why YouTube is clearly TV to the consumer — even if Madison Avenue hasn't accepted it
• 11:10 – Could YouTube reach a 33% share of total TV time the way the big three broadcasters once did
• 12:48 – Why defaulting to YouTube when you can't find anything to watch is the behavior that changes everything

$100 CPMs aren't crazy. They're already happening in political.

The model is simple: ad inventory is shrinking as viewing shifts to streaming — fewer hours are ad-supported, and those that are carry a fraction of linear's ad load. By 2035, Michael's model shows roughly 11% fewer total impressions than today, against a market that's grown 10%. That math compounds into a CPM surge. A car dealership in Atlanta geo-targeted to in-market buyers within 20 miles already produces a $1,000 effective CPM. Political advertisers in battleground states are already paying $100 CPMs on broadcast. The number isn't the shock — it's that streaming hasn't gotten there yet.

• 13:56 – Why shrinking ad inventory plus market growth compounds into $100 CPMs
• 14:30 – The car dealership in Atlanta: how addressable targeting creates a $1,000 effective CPM
• 16:00 – Why political advertising is the test lab where the future of streaming measurement gets proven first

The theater floor tells you what streaming can't yet monetize.

Box office attendance, adjusted for inflation, is still 35% below 2019 levels. Nobody has figured out how to make a $200 million movie work on streaming economics. The studios haven't solved it. Netflix has pulled back on big-budget film spending. Until someone cracks the code on premium theatrical-to-streaming monetization, the big screen stays in distress — and streaming budgets stay rationalized.

• 17:36 – Why streaming still can't monetize a $200M movie effectively
• 18:00 – Box office at 35% below 2019 in inflation-adjusted terms — and what that means for content spend
• 18:47 – Whether the Paramount/WBD deal ever closes — and why the economics of legacy media are more challenged than anyone in ad sales wants to admit

Connect with Michael Beach on LinkedIn · State of the Screens · Screen Wars (book)

Have a question? Send us a text!

Tim sits down with Simeon McMillan, Principal of Accrued Interest, to work through four of the most consequential questions in streaming right now — the Netflix engagement panic, the YouTube revenue parallel nobody is drawing, what Fox/Roku actually means for the home screen, and whether the Paramount/WBD deal ever closes.

Netflix and YouTube are in the same weight class but Wall Street hasn't noticed.
Strip away the noise and compare the revenue. Netflix and YouTube are within 5-15% of each other in any given quarter — and their growth rates have been running neck and neck for two years. The Netflix engagement panic, Simeon argues, is being driven by people reacting to headlines rather than reading what Netflix actually discloses. They publish weekly Top 10 lists for 90 countries. The engagement report they pulled back was created for the writers' unions in 2023 — it was never an investor metric.

• 2:08 – Why YouTube is the only company in Netflix's weight class that nobody compares to Netflix
• 3:41 – Why Netflix's 1-3% viewership growth looks different when the base is 90 billion minutes
• 6:24 – Why YouTube growing at 10-12% with no hit shows should reframe how we read Netflix metrics

Netflix engagement panic is wrong. "Revenue-per-hour" is what matters.
Netflix has outgrown YouTube on revenue per programming hour in almost every quarter over the last two years. The real story isn't whether engagement hours are up 1% or 3% — it's that Netflix extracts more revenue per dollar of content spend than any other media company, and that ratio keeps improving. When the format mix shifts to include podcasts, shorts, and live sports, measuring pure watch time becomes even less useful.

• 8:12 – Why revenue per hour, not total hours, is the metric that matters for Netflix
• 12:12 – What the engagement panic actually exposed: who reads Netflix's disclosures vs. who reacts to news
• 15:58 – Why Netflix's $700M NFL spend is a signal to advertisers, not a red flag for investors

Fox acquiring Roku is acquiring a strategic choke point.
Simeon's three-part series on Fox/Roku frames the deal as a distribution play, not a content play — Fox is buying control of the passageway through which streaming viewership flows. For Netflix and Disney+, nothing changes. For everyone else, home screen placement, discovery priority, and promotional real estate on 100 million Roku devices just got a new landlord. Fox, Simeon argues, is the most strategically disciplined of all the legacy media players — they sold at the peak of Peak TV and are now buying back in at exactly the right moment.

• 18:06 – Why Netflix not having hardware is not an impediment — and why Roku can't afford to cut them off
• 19:37 – The choke point thesis: what Fox/Roku means for apps that aren't Netflix or Disney+
• 20:14 – Why Fox is the most strategically disciplined legacy media company — and what they're actually buying

The home screen is now as important as advertising.
Over 50% of total TV viewing has crossed over into streaming for the first time. As more viewing moves to the big screen, navigation — where you go, what you see first, what gets surfaced — becomes the discovery layer. Simeon's toddler noticed when HBO Max changed its logo. The Looper Insights data showing Peacock gaining $1.8M in share of voice from a single Apple TV home screen update is the proof point. Home screen placement is arbitrage — and most of the industry hasn't priced it correctly yet.

• 22:41 – Why the home screen is becoming as important as advertising for content discovery
• 23:45 – Why shows are no longer associated with the brand that made them — and what that means for discoverability
• 25:10 – The cross-licensing trend: why HBO, Starz, and others are finally distributing on rival platforms

The Paramount/WBD deal: shaky, but it closes. With concessions.
Simeon called it wrong on whether Skydance would win Paramount. He called it right — he thinks — on why Paramount/WBD has structural problems. His read: the deal closes, but Paramount gets forced to shed assets to service the debt load. Which assets? He won't say. But his next piece argues that by 2029, Netflix makes a run at Universal Studios IP. Subscribe before that one drops.

• 26:40 – Why Simeon's "Dead on Arrival" piece on Paramount/WBD may still be right
• 27:09 – What concessions Paramount will have to make and why the debt load makes it complicated
• 28:06 – Why the international footprint problem was always the deal's structural weakness

Connect with Simeon McMillan on LinkedIn · Accrued Interest

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Tim sits down with Josh Hudgins, Chief Product Officer at VideoAmp, to unpack how the performance media platform connects ad exposure directly to real-world outcomes — store visits, purchases, subscriber signups — and how AI is acting as a semantic layer to reinvent how that data gets interpreted, planned against, and acted on.

The measurement problem is a signal-to-noise problem.
Advertisers and analysts aren't starving for data — they're drowning in dashboards. VideoAmp's answer is a semantic AI layer built on top of their measurement stack that interprets the data, separates noise from signal, and surfaces the insights that actually matter — without replacing the rigorous measurement methodology underneath.

• 1:18 – What VideoAmp is and the core problem it solves: closing the loop between ad exposure and real-world outcomes
• 2:13 – How VideoAmp built its data asset: set-top boxes, smart TVs, streaming log-level data via clean rooms
• 6:19 – The new AI-powered reporting experience: from monolithic dashboards to interactive insight conversations

The alchemy nobody expected: audience + content + platform = lift.
When you can report at a creative level all the way through to outcomes across every platform simultaneously, you start finding combinations that no analyst would have predicted. A specific audience, paired with specific content, on a specific platform, driving measurable lift for a specific product. That's not a dashboard insight. That's a campaign brief.

• 7:54 – What the data reveals when AI interprets it: creative-level performance tied to real-world outcomes
• 9:30 – How the AI journey goes from insight to media plan to agentic campaign orchestration
• 10:25 – Why siloed channel teams are being replaced by audience-first, outcome-first structures

Media planning is becoming a real-time optimization loop.
The traditional cycle — annual media mix model, allocation decision, wait and see — is collapsing. VideoAmp is working with publishers on mid-flight optimization tied directly to outcomes, compressing what used to take a year into a near-real-time feedback loop. The automotive supply chain example makes the implications concrete: media exposure signals flowing back into inventory planning.

• 10:56 – How AI compresses the learning and response cycle from annual to near real time
• 11:59 – The automotive case: from dealership visits to supply chain signals, all connected to media exposure
• 13:21 – What it looks like when the measurement flywheel starts spinning faster

Agent-to-agent integrations will make brittle API workflows obsolete.
The next six months: agencies, streaming platforms, and media companies are all building AI agents — and those agents are starting to talk to each other. What used to take 12 months to integrate now takes weeks. Josh explains what that means for the pace of new capability development and why it's the most exciting technical shift he's seen.

• 13:48 – What agent-to-agent integrations actually are and why they replace brittle API workflows
• 14:27 – How different entities — buyers, sellers, platforms — are now connecting via agents
• 15:51 – Why AI unlocks more human time, not less: the case for focusing on connection and ideas

Connect with Josh Hudgins on LinkedIn · VideoAmp

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Tim sits down with Jon Schulz, CMO at Viant, the day after the company reports its best quarter ever — revenue up 34%, CTV now 50% of total revenue, and a single NBA Finals ad moment hitting $120 CPM, nearly double the Super Bowl. This is the Viant Earnings Brunch.

'Best quarter ever' was 27-years in the making.
Revenue up 34%. CTV at 50% of total revenue. Direct CTV transactions up from 50% to 80% in a single quarter. IRIS Content ID now on 50% of the CTV bid stream, targeting 70% by year end. Viant Household ID mapped to 95% of US households. None of this happened overnight — Jon walks through the acquisitions, infrastructure investments, and strategic decisions that made Q2 2026 possible.

• 0:31 – The Q2 numbers: 34% revenue growth, 50% CTV mix, $120 CPM NBA Finals peak
• 1:26 – Why best quarter ever is the result of a long-term plan, not a lucky cycle
• 2:11 – How eliminating non-value-added resellers created a win for both publishers and advertisers

Meta, Google, and Amazonall have buying tools. They also have a serious conflict of interest...learn about it.
Google has DV360. Amazon has Amazon DSP. But 80%+ of their revenue comes from their own owned-and-operated inventory. The buying interface is a gateway to their supply — not a neutral platform. Meanwhile, the top 52% of advertisers have grown just 1% annually over 15 years, while the Mag 7 grew 550% over the same period. Jon puts a number on who is actually winning in digital advertising — and it's not the brands.

• 3:41 – Viant's history: from exclusive inventory to Time Inc. to independent buy-side platform
• 4:26 – Why Amazon DSP and DV360 are gateways to owned inventory, not neutral DSPs
• 5:10 – The stat: top advertisers up 1% annually over 15 years. Mag 7 up 550%.

Only 5% of customers are in market at any given moment but most ad budgets spend like it's 100%.
The overinvestment in performance advertising has funneled most ad dollars toward converting demand that already exists — ignoring the 95% of future customers who haven't raised their hand yet. CTV and TV have always been the best format for demand generation. That's the thesis behind Viant's Outcomes product: measurable performance outside the walled gardens, on the open internet.

• 6:23 – Why the over-focus on performance advertising is suppressing brand growth
• 7:20 – What the open internet actually means and what inventory it includes
• 8:57 – Game five of the NBA Finals on the open internet: $120 CPM, nearly 2X the Super Bowl

Did you know? According to TVision attention metrics: 30% of ads run to an empty room. Viant can now bid against the ones that don't.
TVision — Viant's attention signal acquisition — measures three things: is someone in the room, how many people are watching, and second-by-second eyes-on-screen attention. The NBA Finals comeback moment is the perfect case study: attention collapsed during the blowout, then spiked when the Knicks started climbing back. Viant's platform can now bid up or down in real time based on that signal.

• 9:59 – What TVision measures: in-room presence, co-viewing, eyes-on-screen attention
• 10:29 – Why 30% of CTV ads run to an empty room
• 13:12 – The NBA Finals comeback: how attention data moves in real time within a single program

The Viant streaming stack: household ID, content ID, attention signal.
Viant Household ID is in 80% of programmatic bid requests and covers 96% of CTV requests — mapped to 95% of US households. IRIS Content ID is at 50% of the bid stream, heading to 70%. At those coverage levels, these stop being proxies and start being currencies. Jon explains what it takes to get a signal from 7% to 50% to 70% — and why scale is everything.

• 14:29 – The full Viant stack: Household ID + IRIS Content ID + TVision attention signal
• 15:16 – Why signal coverage below 30% is a proxy. Above 80% is a currency.
• 16:48 – The grocery store use case: first-party data matched to Viant Household ID at scale

Connect with Jon Schulz on LinkedIn · Viant

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Tim sits down with Matthew Keys, Publisher of The Desk, a media outlet covering the broadcast, streaming, and digital media industry that has grown from a hobbyist blog into a publication that industry executives now regularly check — and walk up to strangers at conferences to mention.

TheDesk.net started as a survival mechanism.
Matthew Keys built The Desk across two different moments of involuntary downtime — first while on paid suspension during a legal situation, then again during COVID when a planned job transition went sideways. Thirteen years later, it's one of the few places covering streaming and broadcasting from someone who actually worked inside both industries.

• 0:44 – Why the desk is called the desk: the assignment desk as the unsung hero of every newsroom
• 3:10 – How The Desk started on suspension and grew through COVID
• 5:45 – The StreamTV show moment: from unknown hobbyist blog to recognized industry outlet

What traditional broadcasters are giving away and calling it a "streaming strategy".
Every major local news station now has a 24-hour FAST feed. That's not a streaming strategy — it's content distribution without a monetization model. Matthew breaks down why Nexstar's Haystack investment, the NewsNation experiment, and the broader local news pivot to streaming are all variations of the same unresolved tension between reach and revenue.

• 7:12 – How local broadcasters are addressing streaming: giving the product away
• 8:30 – Nexstar, Haystack News, and what the largest station group is actually betting on
• 10:15 – NewsNation: what national ambition looks like when you're built on local infrastructure

Are sports the only thing keeping cable alive?

Churn accelerates the moment football season ends and partially recovers when it comes back. That's the only thing holding legacy cable bundles together. Once consumers churn out, the data shows they don't come back — they go to FAST, because to them there's no meaningful difference, and FAST offers more options.

• 15:20 – Why sports is the last thing keeping cable subscribers in the bundle
• 16:44 – What churn data shows about former cable subscribers and where they go
• 17:30 – Why FAST is bad at personalization except for Tubi — and why that matters

The FASTpocalypse is coming. Two thousand channels will become one hundred.
The supply glut is real. Advertisers aren't keeping pace with inventory. Reporting and aggregation are still broken. But the people who work closest to FAST all say the same thing: when the consolidation happens, the channel count drops by 95% and what's left looks a lot like peak cable — around 20 channels that any given viewer actually watches regularly.

• 18:10 – Why FAST supply has outrun advertiser demand
• 19:05 – The 2,000 to 100 channel shakeout thesis
• 20:15 – The Savannah Bananas playbook: YouTube first, then TNT, then the CW

The World Cup drew the numbers it did because it was easy to find.
The FIFA World Cup pulled massive viewership not just because of compelling storylines or home-field time zones — but because rights were consolidated in a way that made the product frictionless. No "this game is on Netflix." No market blackouts. Just find it and watch it. That's the discoverability lesson the rest of the industry keeps failing to apply.

• 22:10 – Why the World Cup's distribution model was as important as its storylines
• 23:00 – The Roku bundle as a frictionless access point
• 23:30 – What professional women's hockey and Banana Ball prove about the YouTube-to-TV pipeline

Connect with Matthew Keys on LinkedIn · Matthew Keys on X · The Desk

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James Smith, who leads monetization at Frequency, joins Tim Rowe to unpack why the ad pod is broken — and why the fix isn't more ads, it's smarter ones. They dive into in-scene advertising, the industry's slow embrace of "fewer ads, better ROAS," and why personalization has to fix the programming guide before it can fix the ad break.

Too Many Channels Chasing Too Little Attention

FAST channels went from a novelty seven years ago to hundreds per platform today — and that glut is the real source of the ad experience problem. James frames it plainly: when discovery becomes the bottleneck, fill rate suffers, and channels that can't fill inventory resort to slate, black screens, or bloated pods just to hit revenue targets. It's not a content problem. It's a supply-and-attention math problem, and the math isn't working for anyone — viewer, publisher, or advertiser.

• 02:51 – Why fragmented attention is now the industry's core challenge
• 03:09 – The discovery problem: hundreds of channels, no way to find yours
• 04:18 – Tim's own ad-pod horror story, and why it's a business problem too

How Frequency's Uses AI to Find the Break Inside the Break (In-Scene Ad Product)

Instead of stuffing more ads between segments, Frequency uses video introspection to identify contextually relevant moments inside the content itself — ad zones that fit the scene, not just the runtime. The goal isn't to add inventory. It's to replace some of the pod with better-performing units, then use an ad balancer to right-size what's left for maximum return on ad spend. James connects this directly to Jounce Media's research: fewer, better-placed ads consistently outperform saturation.

• 05:29 – How AI video introspection identifies in-scene ad zones
• 06:11 – The ad balancer: reducing the pod without reducing revenue
• 07:30 – Why fewer ads can mean higher conversion, not lower

Fewer Sellers, Fewer Hops: Why 'Proximity to the Stream' Is the New SPO

Programmatic's dirty secret is the number of hops — every intermediary between ad sale and publisher payout adds fraud risk and kills transparency. James argues Frequency's position — sitting upstream at channel origination and SSAI — makes it structurally closer to clean supply path optimization than SSPs stacked with resellers. The company isn't trying to own inventory; it's trying to be the shortest path between demand and the stream.

• 09:26 – Who's adopting in-scene units first: OEMs, platforms, or publishers
• 09:52 – Frequency caps and the tools built to avoid making the pod worse
• 12:19 – What Netflix's ad-tier evolution signals for the rest of the industry

80% of Shopping Comes From Feed-Driven Ads - yay or nay?

James's bet on where CTV is headed: personalize the electronic programming guide first, and the advertising experience follows — the same way Instagram's feed conditions purchase behavior. He points to World Cup hydration-break ads as proof that endemic, contextually-earned advertising doesn't irritate viewers; it performs. The next frontier is dynamic creative that swaps based on geography in real time — same ad concept, different local retailer, different outcome.

• 17:51 – What James is most excited about for the rest of 2026 and into 2027
• 18:35 – The Instagram parallel: personalized feed, personalized ads
• 13:04 – The Miami Doritos example: one ad, two dynamically different CTAs

Connect with James Smith and learn more about Frequency's channel monetization tools at https://www.frequency.com/.