Episodes

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 subscript...

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 o...

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" co...

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 televis...

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...

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 a...

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 ...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 ques...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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,...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 t...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 invest...

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 stream...

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...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 d...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 bi...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 si...

Have a question? Send us a text! 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 ...

Have a question? Send us a text! Emily Williams, Consumer Expert at MRI-Simmons, joins Tim Rowe to unpack why the streaming industry's measurement habits are failing the consumers they're supposed to serve — and why fragmentation isn't a technology problem. It's a consumer experience problem. The Average American Uses 11 Streaming Services a Year MRI-Simmons' Cord Evolution Study reveals that 75% of Americans with traditional cable also stream — meaning the incremental reach marketers assume ...

Have a question? Send us a text! Justin Ruiss, SVP of Media at BWG Global, joins Tim Rowe to break down three of the biggest deals in streaming right now — Walmart's acquisition of Vibe.co, the Comcast spinout of NBCU and Peacock, and Fox's $22 billion move on Roku. Justin hosts 30 primary research forums a month with senior industry executives, and brings a synthesized, cross-vertical read that goes well beyond the headlines. Why Walmart Acquired Vibe and How They Declared War on Amazon The ...

Have a question? Send us a text! The conversation is a companion to Nathaniel's recent piece on microdramas. Nathaniel Danziger, Founding Voice at State of Streaming, joins Tim Rowe to unpack what makes a microdrama possible, the operational realities driving this mobile-first shift, and what the partnership between Peacock and ReelShort means for the broader media landscape. On the Microdrama Boom Microdramas have rapidly grown into a $30 billion global phenomenon, defined by short, hyper-me...

Have a question? Send us a text! Tim sits down with Josh Matthews, Founder of StreamScoop, a Substack publication that aggregates open-source viewership data across streaming, broadcast, and cable into weekly data dumps, monthly deep dives, and the best streaming TV guide being published right now — which SOS syndicates weekly. 📺 Get This week's StreamScoop Streaming TV Guide Here Nobody was aggregating open-source streaming viewership data in one place. So Josh built it. StreamScoop s...

Have a question? Send us a text! Wim Sweldens, co-founder of Kiswe, built a direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming company because he unplugged his cable box — and never plugged it back in. Twelve years later, the technology he knew was coming has arrived, and the sports organizations smart enough to own the relationship with their fans are the ones pulling ahead. The RSN Collapse Created a Blueprint Problem, Not Just a Revenue Problem When regional sports networks (RSNs) fell apart, teams...

Have a question? Send us a text! Tim sits down with Russell Fink, a two-decade veteran of regional sports networks, to dig into the measurement crisis hiding in plain sight inside sports streaming. The conversation pairs directly with Russell's piece published in State of Streaming this week — Too Much of a Good Thing: Sports' Measurement Problem — and uses Jurassic Park to explain why having the data isn't the same as using it. The RSN Era Was the Last Time Everyone Won at Once Russel...