State of Streaming Podcast

State of Streaming
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Covering the topics, trends, people, and acquisitions shaping Streaming TV.

  1. How Direct-To-Consumer Streaming Gives Sports Franchises and Creators Revenue Control with Wim Sweldens, Co-Founder of Kiswe

    4d ago ·  Video

    How Direct-To-Consumer Streaming Gives Sports Franchises and Creators Revenue Control with Wim Sweldens, Co-Founder of Kiswe

    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 didn't just lose a distribution partner — they lost the only model they knew. Kiswe's answer isn't to replace one middleman with another. It's to cut them out entirely. 0:55 – The origin story: a crashed cable box, a 4G network, and a company3:16 – Why being early to mobile video wasn't a mistake — it was timing4:43 – What "don't sell your rights, sell your content" actually means in practiceWhen You Own the Platform, You Own the Data Subscription, pay-per-view, dynamic ad insertion — the monetization model matters less than who controls it. Wim breaks down how Kiswe's revenue share structure aligns incentives and why direct fan data is the asset teams are finally realizing they've been giving away. 6:30 – The three monetization models Kiswe enables and how teams use each8:00 – Why influencers selling 50,000 tickets at $20 each is the proof of concept14:03 – Why sports teams see less churn than general streaming apps — and what drives itSEG+ Is the Case Study. Utah Built It First. Smith Entertainment Group (SEG) — owners of the Utah Jazz (NBA) and Utah Mammoth (NHL) — needed one platform for two leagues, two fan bases, and games that sometimes overlap. The result: 40% subscriber growth over two years, 75% Mammoth+ growth in year one, and a MultiView feature that lets fans watch both games simultaneously. 10:10 – How the SEG+ platform unified two franchises under a single login12:02 – The à la carte argument: why fans shouldn't have to buy butter to get milk13:27 – The retention thesis: engaged fans churn less, buy more, and bring friendsDownload the full SEG+ case study to see the numbers. Connect with Wim Sweldens on LinkedIn · Kiswe Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    17 min
  2. How to Measure Sports Viewership in a Streaming World with Russell Fink, Regional Sports Network (RSN) Expert

    6d ago ·  Video

    How to Measure Sports Viewership in a Streaming World with Russell Fink, Regional Sports Network (RSN) Expert

    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  Russell started at SNY in 2007, when regional sports networks were ascendant and the model was simple: hyperlocal content, cable affiliate fees, happy leagues, happy fans, happy advertisers. The streaming wars didn't just disrupt that model — they exposed that no one had a replacement. 2:14 – What RSNs looked like at their peak and why the economics worked for everyone4:47 – Why the shift to streaming put RSNs into survival mode almost overnight6:22 – The cable bundle déjà vu: Congress wanted à la carte then, tooThe Streamers Inherited Linear's Habits and Called It Innovation  When Amazon, Apple, and Facebook took sports rights, Russell expected them to reinvent the viewing experience. Instead, they replicated what fans already knew — and measured it the same way. The lesson: fan behavior is stickier than distribution format. 8:10 – Why Russell was wrong to expect streaming platforms to blow up the format9:33 – What Facebook's live chat experiment revealed about fan tolerance for experimentation11:05 – Why linear strategies persist inside streaming sports — and what that says about where the money still lives16.7 Billion Minutes. Nobody Knows What That Means.  The NBC Olympics touted 16.7 billion minutes viewed. Russell spent his career in research and can't tell you what it means — and that's the problem. When a metric requires twenty minutes to unpack, it's not doing its job. The industry's love of big numbers is actively impeding advertiser confidence. 14:38 – How the streaming measurement land grab produced a world where everyone is number one17:02 – Why "16.7 billion minutes" is a perfect example of a metric that defeats itself19:44 – What the better headline would have been — and why total viewers still winsYour Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether They Could…  The Jurassic Park thesis: the industry built fifty to a hundred new metrics it didn't have nineteen years ago, fell in love with all of them, and forgot to ask which ones actually move the business. Russell's piece is a call to simplify — not because the data is wrong, but because complexity is a sales problem. 21:15 – Where the Jurassic Park framing came from and what it has to do with Tuesday 3:30 PM engagement spikes23:08 – How to think about which metrics actually serve programming, marketing, sales, and affiliate25:44 – Why measurement complexity is part of why the advertiser shift to digital is still stallingPart two is coming. Read the full piece at State of Streaming. Connect with Russell Fink on LinkedIn Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    23 min
  3. How the Home Screen Became the Most Valuable Real Estate in Streaming with Looper Insights CEO, Lucas Bertrand

    Jun 18 ·  Video

    How the Home Screen Became the Most Valuable Real Estate in Streaming with Looper Insights CEO, Lucas Bertrand

    Have a question? Send us a text! Tim sits down with Lucas Bertrand, CEO of Looper Insights, to break down what Looper's Q1 Media Placement Value ($MPV) data reveals about how connected TV home screens are being used — and misused — heading into the biggest sports quarter in recent memory. Recorded the day the FIFA World Cup kicked off, the conversation pairs directly with the Preston Smalley/Roku episode released earlier that week. The CTV Home Screen The Arbitrage of Streaming  Looper's $MPV metric assigns a dollar value to placements across Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, Xfinity, and others — factoring in local CPM rates, device footprint, and engagement. The result is a comparable framework that lets streamers, advertisers, and platforms understand what a homepage placement is actually worth before they negotiate for it. 4:06 – What $MPV is and the three variables that drive it: CPM, device count, and engagement5:59 – Why Roku's 100M device footprint makes its homepage one of the most valuable digital surfaces in media6:49 – The home screen as one of the most valuable websites in the worldThe Winter Olympics Set the Template. The World Cup Is the Stress Test.  Roku's Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics hub generated $36M in $MPV in Q1 — one of the first major hub executions on the platform and a proof of concept for what coherent sports signposting can do. With the World Cup now live across half a dozen broadcasters, multiple languages, and fragmented rights windows, the question is whether that template scales. 14:11 – How the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics hub performed in Q1 $MPV data15:43 – Why the Olympics hub is a model for Peacock, Roku, and other OEMs to build on16:07 – World Cup fragmentation: Telemundo, YouTube first-ten-minutes windows, and the signposting problemLive Sports Errors Are Already Appearing in the World Cup Data.  Looper monitors CTV interfaces in real time and is already surfacing errors to partners in the early days of the tournament — wrong match times, missing delay notifications, outdated location data. When a game gets rained off and every platform needs to update simultaneously, the gap between what's on screen and what's actually happening becomes a real fan experience problem. 17:18 – How Looper monitors live event signposting in real time18:02 – The types of errors already appearing in World Cup data: times, locations, delays19:09 – Why "it's available everywhere" is sometimes no answer at allQ2 $MPV report expected mid-July. We'll have Lucas back to break it down when it drops. Connect with Lucas Bertrand on LinkedIn · Looper Insights Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    16 min
  4. How to Build a $22B Home Screen with Roku VP of Viewer Product, Preston Smalley

    Jun 15 ·  Video

    How to Build a $22B Home Screen with Roku VP of Viewer Product, Preston Smalley

    Have a question? Send us a text! Tim sits down with Preston Smalley, VP of Viewer Product at Roku, unpacking the first new Roku home screen in a decade — how it was designed for 100 million+ households, what the hub methodology means for sports fragmentation, and why "delight" isn't just a brand word at Roku. It's a measured KPI. 82% of streaming viewers want you to read their mind  Roku built a home screen with a billion possible configurations to get closer to doing exactly that — and they're measuring whether it's working. Preston breaks down how Roku balances personalization with customization, why quick access felt "wrong" to users at first and indispensable a week later, and how a fictional city on your screensaver became one of the platform's most measurable loyalty drivers. 1:51 – Designing for 100M+ households: how surveys, diary studies, and a billion possible configurations shaped the new home screen4:42 – What "personalization" actually means: familiar content, adjacent discovery, trending signals, and human curators working together6:55 – AI in practice: how Roku layers large language models on top of its proprietary TV-specific models — and why general AI alone doesn't know what episode just dropped8:36 – The diary study insight: why users hated quick access on day one and couldn't live without it a week laterSports on streaming is more fragmented than cable ever was Roku's answer isn't aggregation — it's destination design. Preston explains how the Roku hub methodology works: one place for a fan to find their league, their team, their game — and the app they need to stream it, or free highlights if they don't have it. The NHL hub just launched. All four major leagues are now covered. World Cup planning is underway. 11:38 – The hub methodology: why sports fragmentation is a discovery problem, not a rights problem13:25 – World Cup and the Olympics playbook: medal counts, bracket tracking, and what "cultural moment" infrastructure looks like on a home screen14:37 – The global Roku business: #1 in the US, Mexico, and Canada — and why free live TV and antenna-blending are the growth story in BrazilWhy Roku City is a screensaver It's also a brand platform, a live event venue, a trivia game host, and one of Roku's top two sources of measured user delight. 16:55 – Roku City as loyalty infrastructure: IP partnerships, live events, Roku Dash, and why users don't experience it as advertising17:52 – How Roku actually measures delight — and what it has to do with finding a show you didn't know you likedConnect with Preston Smalley on LinkedIn Learn more about Roku at roku.com For more on how Roku is monetizing the home screen as a media property, read our full breakdown of the $MPV methodology from Looper Insights here. Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    22 min
  5. How Telecom-Grade AI Personalization Can Solve Streaming Retention with Hemant Soni, AI Architect

    Jun 11 ·  Video

    How Telecom-Grade AI Personalization Can Solve Streaming Retention with Hemant Soni, AI Architect

    Have a question? Send us a text! The conversation is a companion to Hemant's recent piece on AI personalization at scale. Hemant Soni, AI Architect and SOS. contributor, joins Tim Rowe to unpack what streaming platforms can learn from the infrastructure telecom companies built under survival pressure — and how to start applying it now.  On Combatting Churn Streaming platforms collect mountains of behavioral data — what you watch, what you skip, when you disengage — and respond days or weeks later with a generic retention email. By then, the subscriber has already left. The model that actually works isn't coming from Netflix or Spotify. It's coming from telecom. 1:32 – About how telecom is mastering personalization — and why it matters for streaming3:05 – T-Mobile's customer decision hub: processing 140M+ subscriber signals in under 200 milliseconds5:33 – Comcast's convergence advantage: telecom-grade AI infrastructure applied directly to Peacock's 32M broadband customersWhy "Feeling Understood" Matters Most The shift Hemant describes — from responding after a customer cancels to predicting intent before they act — is the key unlock. Customers don't feel retained. They feel understood. That's the difference between a churn intervention and a relationship. 6:08 – What Comcast is actually deploying: not experiments, proven telecom intelligence7:32 – The four pillars of AI personalization and what each one means for a streaming operator11:17 – Where to start: a practical framework for media companies beginning the AI journeyGet Hemant's 90-day Fast Start Framework  Start with personalization. It's the highest ROI use case, and once you show impact there, scaling AI gets easier everywhere else. Hemant closes with the most actionable thing in the episode — month one: identify use cases and clean your data. Month two: build and test AI models at small scale. Month three: optimize and scale what worked. 12:42 – Building a unified data foundation: what to connect, clean, and make reusable13:56 – Why personalization is the highest ROI AI use case14:30 – Language barriers, content hypergrowth, and what AI-enabled localization actually unlocksConnect with Hemant Soni on LinkedIn and read his full article here. Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    19 min
  6. The Ad Tech Middle with First Party Capital General Partners Kevin Flood, Rich Ashton, and Ciarán O'Kane

    Jun 9 ·  Bonus

    The Ad Tech Middle with First Party Capital General Partners Kevin Flood, Rich Ashton, and Ciarán O'Kane

    Have a question? Send us a text! Bonus Episode: Tim Rowe on the FPC Podcast — Open Infrastructure, Closed Loops, and the Ad Tech Middle Tim joins Kevin Flood, Rich Ashton, and Ciarán O'Kane — General Partners at First Party Capital — for a conversation on their investment thesis and what it reveals about where streaming advertising infrastructure is actually heading. FPC crossed State of Streaming's radar when their corporate innovation model announcement landed the same week as a notable product update from The Trade Desk. What followed was a conversation worth sharing with the SOS. universe. Did You Know? AWS is projected to generate 3x the margin on AI services versus traditional compute in 2026, with 40% of year-over-year growth coming from AI and machine learning — not the media vertical.  The cloud is not neutral infrastructure.  It has a point of view, and it's shaping ad tech. The FPC partners are direct about what they are: picks-and-shovels investors.  They don't back the next sexy format or the latest AI wrapper — they back the companies building the infrastructure nobody sees but everybody needs. 1:10 – What is State of Streaming?2:37 – First-party data as the new center of gravity. Should you: build, own, outsource, or layer on top?4:00 – Why the value in ad tech has shifted away from software — and toward data, finance, and infrastructure8:30 – Live sports as the unsolved problem in streaming advertising: the gap that Bedrock and Index Exchange are positioned to closeThe Trade Desk vs. Publicis spat wasn't really about advertiser outcomes.  It was two economic models colliding — a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) maximizing margin on one side, principal media buying maximizing agency take rate on the other. The advertiser is mostly a bystander. 10:17 – Margin compression as the real story: where the 40–50p in the pound is actually going13:52 – Tim puts the question directly: what gave FPC the conviction to back Bedrock early?14:28 – The ad tech middle: why global scale DSPs don't serve everyone, and what Bedrock was built to solve17:26 – The cloud tax nobody talks about: how AWS, Google, and Amazon costs get embedded in every startup's pricing22:01 – What SOS. found when it looked at how much of the streaming universe runs on AWS23:21 – Lumen: how a first-party attention signal company became one of FPC's largest portfolio positions — and why the Netflix UK deal mattersMost ad tech money flows toward the obvious infrastructure. FPC is betting on something different: composable, containerized, margin-efficient layers that the big incumbents can't easily replicate — and that the ad tech middle actually needs. Learn more about First Party Capital and their portfolio. This episode originally aired on the FPC Podcast.  It appears here as a State of Streaming bonus episode. Earlier this year, SOS. covered how the Trade Desk's platform strategy is reshaping the open web buying debate — read it here. Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    30 min
  7. How Comcast & Cox & Spectrum Reach Unify Linear And Streaming with Ampersand VP of Integrated Sales, Seth Mittman

    Jun 5 ·  Video

    How Comcast & Cox & Spectrum Reach Unify Linear And Streaming with Ampersand VP of Integrated Sales, Seth Mittman

    Have a question? Send us a text! Tim sits down with Seth Mittman, VP of Integrated Sales at Ampersand, unpacking how the ad infrastructure jointly owned by Comcast, Charter, and Cox unifies linear and streaming inventory — and what that means for brand marketers, agency planners, and anyone trying to understand where Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD) inventory fits in a modern media mix. Did you know streaming-only buys are leaving reach on the table? Brands that added linear inventory saw an average 131% lift. The ones that haven't are paying for it. Mittman breaks down what Ampersand actually is, what it isn't, and why the distinction between "one-stop shop" VS. "end-to-end solution" matters more than it sounds. 1:00 – What redefining cable actually meant — and why it took eight years, not four2:25 – The co-opetition structure: how Comcast, Charter, and Cox became one ad sales entity3:16 – The sports footprint: 90% of live sports events on television, cross-platformHow do you actually buy live sports through Ampersand? Mittman is direct: programmatic live sports isn't the product yet. Direct Insertion Order (IO) is. But the real move is running the same campaign simultaneously across linear and streaming — hitting the audience wherever they went, without upfront guarantees. 4:49 – Activation: what placing a buy actually looks like across 210 Designated Market Areas (DMAs)6:10 – End-to-end vs. one-stop shop: why the framing change matters for buyers8:07 – Political: local scale, programmatic expansion, and why it's a separate teamAmpersand is the ad infrastructure behind Comcast, Charter, and Cox — yet most buyers have never heard of them. Everyone knows Comcast.  Everyone knows Spectrum.  Everyone knows Cox. But almost nobody knows the backbone sitting behind their combined ad sales effort. Mittman walks through how he educates buyers, what questions he needs answered in every meeting, and why "who are you trying to reach and what are you trying to accomplish" is the only brief that matters. 9:01 – Core business: holding companies, independents, and the education gap10:25 – Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD) explained: the barbecue version11:16 – Trends: why live sports content is pulling buyers back to context alignment14:42 – What excites Mittman most after three decades: convergence, not disruptionConnect with Seth Mittman: seth.mittman@ampersand.tv Learn more about Ampersand at ampersand.tv Earlier this week we covered Ampersand's closed-loop attribution partnership with Fandango and Kochava — read it here. Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    18 min
  8. How Attention Follows Content (Webinar Replay) with David Sanderson, Founder of Reelgood

    Jun 4 ·  Video

    How Attention Follows Content (Webinar Replay) with David Sanderson, Founder of Reelgood

    Have a question? Send us a text! Tim sits down with David Sanderson, Founder of Reelgood, unpacking how content availability data reveals where attention actually goes on streaming — and what that means for media buyers, platform teams, and content strategists. Content availability isn't a metadata problem. It's an attention problem.  Most of the industry is making catalog, licensing, and buying decisions based on incomplete information. Reelgood built the infrastructure to fix that — and the insights that fall out of it reframe how you think about viewership, platform strategy, and where the real gaps are. 1:00 – What Reelgood built and why Google was one of their first customers2:36 – The 88% problem: what's actually available across the major streaming services4:00 – How a single canonical content ID changes the data picture entirelyHow did Loudermilk go from 800th to 8th the moment Netflix picked it up and merchandised it?  Find out why that's not an anomaly. When you overlay content availability data against viewership data, platform moves become explainable and predictable. The data also reveals what competitors are quietly doing by genre, what's sitting unlicensed, and where your catalog has white space. 7:10 – Loudermilk: the case study that shows platform placement is a viewership variable9:16 – How to use competitor catalog data to inform your own content strategy10:20 – The advertising angle: content availability as a media buying arbitrage leverWhy does Franchise content compound? The Squid Game data makes the case cleanly — each new release created a measurable halo effect on every other title in the universe. And catalog gaps are a buyer problem too: Reelgood found 81 titles missing from the Prime/Max channel, including Moonlight and Dune. 13:00 – The Squid Game ping-pong: how franchise releases drive attention across an entire universe15:30 – Catalog blind spots: what media buyers may not be getting when they buy bundled channels17:00 – How Reelgood's popularity score is being integrated into SOS.'s Unified Streaming Power IndexDownload the deck 🔽 Connect with David Sanderson here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidaesanderson/ And Reelgood here: https://data.reelgood.com/ Thanks to Looper Insights for sponsoring today’s show! Ready to unlock your streaming strategy edge? Head over to 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 mystreamingvalue.com to get your free insights today!  Support the show

    31 min
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Covering the topics, trends, people, and acquisitions shaping Streaming TV.

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  • Creator
    State of Streaming
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 State of Streaming Podcast
  • Show Website
    State of Streaming Podcast

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