I publish a quarterly TV survey. People at Netflix, Disney, FOX, and the NFL read it.
I’m not leading with that to brag. I’m leading with it because that’s what a media platform looks like in this business. It isn’t a blog calendar. It isn’t a thought-leadership slide. It’s a reason for the right people to keep showing up.
Video tech companies build serious products. Cloud MAM. FAST. Multiview. Decisioning. Live sports workflows. Then they go quiet. Then they wonder why the people who buy this stuff still don’t know they exist.
The usual fix is more ads. Or more BDRs. Or another white paper that could have been written about a CRM company.
That is not how this market thinks.
This industry already has a reading list
The buyers are experts. They’ve been through YouTube, Netflix, the crack-up of the bundle, and about six official “years of CTV.”
They’re cynical. They’re cost-constrained. They already have a stack. They read StreamTV Insider, Sports Video Group, TVNewsCheck, Streaming Media. They walk the floor at NAB. They sit through the panels.
If you don’t have a point of view that can live in that conversation, you are renting attention. And rental attention is gone the minute the insertion order ends.
I know, because I write those columns. I also know what happens after the column runs. Nothing — unless you built a place for the work to live.
I didn’t set out to build a “media platform”
I set out to stay in the argument.
Four times a year I field a survey. I publish the findings. I host a Zoom briefing. When there’s something worth saying, I write it up for the trades. Then I put the decks, the chaptered briefings, and the artifacts in a library so the work doesn’t die on Friday morning.
That’s the loop.
A research drop. A live conversation. A shelf. A list that isn’t a blast of product news.
#FutureOfTV.Live is that loop. This blog is the newest piece of it.
Why this beats what most people call content marketing
Content marketing, as it’s usually practiced, is one move. You write a post. You schedule it. You hope Google is kind.
In this business the work has to travel. A survey slide becomes a panel question. The panel becomes a column. The column points back to the library. The library is where someone subscribes. Next quarter, they show up again.
It only works if the work is specific. Vertical live. Context windows. Channel surfing versus the grid. Screensavers. Captions. Not “five ways to think about thought leadership.”
I can smell generalist content from a hallway away. So can your buyers. They’ve sat through too many webinars that opened with a definition of innovation.
The AI part, without the brochure
I use AI. A lot. I built a vault that chapters my own webinars and pulls quotes so I can skim a briefing the way I skim a table of contents.
That is not “the platform runs itself.” That is me refusing to let a 90-minute Zoom rot in an on-demand graveyard.
The job is still the point of view. The survey. The panel. The sentence that says the quiet part. AI is the intern that never sleeps. It is not the editor-in-chief.
Two things that actually matter
First: pick a beat and stay on it. Mine is viewer behavior — the stuff the trades miss because they’re covering the deal. Yours might be FAST economics, or sports production, or the CTV stack. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s yours, and that you can still be talking about it four quarters from now.
Second: put the work where people can find it later. A Zoom that disappears is a party. A library is a business.
If you sell into TV tech and you don’t have that loop — survey or not, Zoom or not — you’re asking the trades to carry your category narrative. They won’t. They have a newsroom to fill.
This blog is where I’ll keep the longer version. The survey still lives in the library. The briefing is still four times a year.
Comment, reach out, and come to the next #FutureOfTV.Live Zoomcast if you want to argue about it.