The Live Show Silicon Valley Can’t Quit — and Hollywood Wants to Copy
How ‘TBPN’ turns a 50K audience into real money. Plus: a first look at Assistants vs. Agents’ new show
This is a preview of Like & Subscribe, my standalone Ankler Media newsletter on the creator economy. I wrote about YouTube’s media dominance and new “studio era,” scooped that Beast Industries fired the employee that Kalshi investigated over insider trading, and covered how video podcasts are taking over TV. I’m natalie@theankler.com
Last Friday, ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick stepped out of an all-hands meeting at the downtown Los Angeles office of his stealthy food systems business and drove to the Hollywood studio of tech news show TBPN to reveal live on air that he was rebranding the company — new name: Atoms — and expanding into mining and transportation.
TBPN’s daily three-hour show, which streams live on X, YouTube and LinkedIn, averages around 50,000 live unique viewers across all platforms, but it was the right audience for Kalanick, who mere minutes into his hourlong interview groaned about his days running Uber when he was “dealing with 100 headlines every day, deciding what you do — or the actions you take — based on what the New York Times is going to write.” The interview was quickly picked up by Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times and CNBC, and the clips are now making the rounds on every major social media platform.
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Created by entrepreneurs and tech world insiders Jordi Hays and John Coogan, TBPN (the acronym stands for Technology Business Programming Network) has become a hit in Silicon Valley, where billionaires and venture capitalists, startup founders and CEOs share and dissect its clips obsessively — which perhaps explains how a show with only 56,000 subscribers on YouTube has become the subject of exhaustive profiles in the NYT, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
At first TBPN’s success felt like an anomaly, more indicative of the insular, gossip-obsessed world of tech bros than of broader audience trends.
But after years of false starts, live streaming is taking off — fueled by audiences already trained to watch long-form video podcasts, and by platforms from TikTok to YouTube to Substack racing to build better tools and monetization. Now Netflix is streaming live podcasts, like the Oscars recap episode of The Ringer’s The Big Picture, which I checked out on Sunday.
Andrew Graham, an agent leading business development for CAA’s Creators division, notes that podcasting’s pivot to video has habituated audiences to watching long-form digital-first shows. “Prior to this, there were lots of attempts at live streaming,” he says. “Finally, it seems like it’s clicking.”
These days, politicos can live stream hours of commentary from the MeidasTouch Podcast on YouTube, and football fans can watch a live alternative halftime show from creator Caleb Pressley on X. And there’s a new crop of shows building themselves in TBPN’s mold, including marketing-focused The Breaking & Entering Show, which streamed its first live show on March 4, and a soon-to-launch Hollywood news program from the team behind Instagram meme account Assistants vs. Agents.
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Meanwhile, TBPN has tapped a president (former HQ Trivia head of partnerships Dylan Abruscato), reportedly sold out all its advertising inventory for the year, and signed with CAA to help it expand into licensing, touring and other new business areas.
Last week, I visited the TBPN studio after Hays and Coogan wrapped their show for the day. As they tucked into lunch — and as new outro music blared sporadically through the studio speakers — they walked me through their blueprint for finding their niche without sacrificing influence, including why they consider live just the top of their content funnel. Plus, I spoke with Assistants vs. Agents founder Warner Bailey about the optimistic entertainment news show at the center of his media ambitions.
Read more over at Like & Subscribe, where you’ll learn:
How Hays and Coogan spun their startup background into TBPN — and their plans to triple their revenue number this year
The real limitation of live and the clipping machine that makes it work
How the show punches above its weight in brand partnerships, and its top advertisers
Why this model is spreading beyond tech — and what the podcast boom has to do with it
Warner Bailey’s journey from meme account to media brand and his plan to take AvA live daily
How both TBPN and AvA Live are rebuilding “appointment viewing” for the internet era
The rest of this column is for paid subscribers to Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter dedicated to the creator economy from Ankler Media.
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