If you are building a media company right now, you can get surprisingly far with a good idea, a solid product, and a crop of people who really care about it.
You can launch fast. You can find a sizeable audience on TikTok, YouTube, Substack, Twitch. You can use AI to make more content, test more ideas, and make moves before a traditional media company has even scheduled the meeting (nearly 70 percent of working creatives already use AI, according to a new survey from Contra Labs.)
That has resulted in more people making content than ever.
Creator advertising spend grew 26 percent in 2025 alone, roughly four times faster than the media industry overall. Huge volumes of attention and capital are also moving through video, gaming, podcasts, live communities, newsletters, and streaming platforms.
But making content and growing an audience is not the same thing as building a lasting business. Take the recent news about Character.AI, the app where millions of people roleplay with AI characters, which filed for bankruptcy, facing legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds, including settled lawsuits from families who said their children were harmed by its chatbots.Disney had also demanded it stop hosting unauthorized chatbots of its characters.
Meanwhile, a new class of startups is building around permission. Mirror Mirror AI, for one, calls itself the licensing and rights infrastructure for AI-generated content, a marketplace where brands digitally cast real models, with their approval, and the models get paid.
Character.AI is an extreme case, but it’s a telling sign of the risks behind every fast media launch. All of these new-age platforms should be asking the hard questions.
Not only about keeping people’s attention and making money from them, but about the unglamorous infrastructure, like the rights, licensing, partnership, and distribution work that can decide whether the business actually survives and grows.
This is where the established media companies are actually useful to study. The likes of HBO and Amazon are legendary media machines that dominate not just because of a few incredible shows, but because they are constantly innovating, evolving, taking calculated risks and making sure there is always something next.
In product, yes, but also in ad sales, distribution, partnerships, rights, technology, commerce.
A lot of that work is done by unsung heroes behind the scenes. The people who are:
- negotiating global rights and licensing deals
- building advertising products
- finding distribution partners
- deciding what to acquire, or
- figuring out how a gaming platform can connect to a much bigger business.
Over the past few weeks I’ve talked with four people who work in different parts of that machine: Talha Asad, SVP of Drama Programming at HBO; Nikhil Nair, Principal of Tech & Business Development at Amazon; Jenn Dickey, who works on Twitch integration at Amazon; and James Ruggerio, who works across Strategy & Content Partnerships at Roku.
What they had to say can offer insight for emerging media brands.
HBO: Keep the pipeline moving
Talha Asad has worked on some of HBO’s defining shows, including Succession, The Last of Us, Mare of Easttown, and Perry Mason. Those shows give HBO cultural relevance, new subscribers, and a reason for people to keep opening the app. They also end.
“At HBO, we’ve seen a lot of success,” Asad told me. “Sure, but we can’t just sit around and say, ‘Well, Veep is a hit—that’s great.’ No. When Veep is over, we need our next Veep.”
That is a very real problem for every company with a breakout success. A hit creates momentum. It also raises expectations. Audiences start asking what else you have. Advertisers, partners, and investors do the same.
HBO’s answer involves a huge amount of work that viewers never see. Teams are developing new shows, thinking about release schedules, figuring out how one series sits next to another, and protecting the idea of what “feels like HBO.” A drama can be darker, stranger, funnier, or smaller than the last one. It still has to feel connected to the larger brand.
This is especially true as audience loyalty has become harder to hold onto. Roughly 39 percent of consumers canceled at least one streaming service in the previous six months, and 41 percent said the content available through their subscriptions was not worth the price.
Demand for new content never lets up. HBO’s content chief, Casey Bloys, has said part of their strategy is delivering 52 weeks of new programming a year. AI companies are racing to help meet that kind of demand to speed up creative development, but tellingly, the speed doesn’t come from automation alone. Take AI video platform Higgsfield: its 150 people team is roughly half engineers and half creatives.
That pairing is likely where creative development and pipeline production is headed: the two working side by side, so ideas move from concept to finished product faster and better. In fact, 60% of creatives surveyed by Contra Labs offer or plan to offer AI workflow design as a service, and 50% offer or plan AI creative direction.
New Age Platform Takeaway:
Think beyond one product, one format, or one moment of audience excitement. What is your pipeline? What does the experience look like after someone has finished the thing that brought them in? How do your products sit next to one another while still feeling recognizably yours?
The workflows behind content may look similar across companies. Your point of view should not. Know the operating system, but also know the brand—and what makes your product your product.
Amazon and Twitch: Build around the audience
Amazon has a different set of advantages. Prime Video sits alongside retail, AWS, advertising, devices, subscriptions, sports rights, and Twitch. Every part of that system gives Amazon another relationship with the same customer.
Nikhil Nair works in Tech and Business Development at Amazon, where rights, partnerships, and dealmaking shape what the company can offer around the world. The deals themselves can get incredibly complicated. Rights are fragmented by country, platform, and use case, and every company is working with a finite pot of money. “Deal making in content revolves around rights fragmentation and allocation of property,” Nair says. “Whether you take the conservative approach or one that indulges is ultimately up to what your department is trying to achieve in terms of strategy.”
That strategy looks different at Amazon because Prime Video does not have to carry the entire weight of the relationship. Amazon can acquire a library, invest in sports rights, develop a technology partnership, or build a new consumer service—and think about how each decision helps the rest of the business. The goal is to keep building an ecosystem where content, commerce, advertising, and technology strengthen one another.
Twitch shows what that looks like once a specific community enters the picture. Jenn Dickey, who works across Twitch integration at Amazon, describes gaming as “the largest singular entertainment vehicle globally by revenue,” reaching an audience that often does not subscribe to traditional streaming services.
Her job is to help connect that audience to Amazon through media buying, content partnerships, sales, and custom programs. “Let’s get these people plugged into as many places as we can,” she says. “It’s not just about promotion of our other products. It’s also about how to sell across multiple channels than just Amazon’s site.”
New Age Platform Takeaway:
The buck does not stop once your product is live. Think about the other segments of the company that can grow around it. Your audience will not only interact with you in one way: they may watch, game, shop, attend, make things, or work through your tools. What else do they find once they enter your world? Build the partnerships, distribution channels, and revenue streams that make those next steps possible.
Roku: Give people different ways in
Roku sits at another important point in the media system: the moment when someone decides what to watch and which platform will get their attention.
James Ruggerio works across strategy and content partnerships at Roku. His work includes FAST channels, or free ad-supported streaming television. These services give viewers access to shows and movies without asking them to take on another monthly bill.
Content companies get another outlet for their libraries. Advertisers get access to viewers who have moved away from traditional television.
FAST has been building for more than a decade—Pluto TV, launched in 2014, is widely considered the first dedicated FAST service—and the model is now central to how platforms think about distribution. It gives content companies a way to get more eyes on their franchises and libraries, build awareness for their larger services, and create another stream of advertising revenue.
Today, 64% of U.S. Roku households stream FAST channels.
“It’s another marketing option and streamers take them very seriously now,” Ruggerio says. “Disney is launching 15 new channels of premium content with us, we’re also doing deals with Universal, Bravo… you name it. Monetizing content does very well in the FAST ecosystem.”
You may think, why on Earth would I watch a FAST channel with ads when I already pay for streaming services? What many people forget is that most of the world only has about 1-2 streaming services per household. It’s a luxury to have more than two in most countries across the globe.
New Age Platform Takeaway:
Build more than one way in. Some people will pay for a premium product; others will come through a free, ad-supported experience, a partnership, or a creator. Each path should have a job: grow the audience, create revenue, or move people deeper into your ecosystem. Roku’s model shows how content, distribution, partnerships, and advertising can all work together around the same viewer.
Worldbuilding to stay relevant
The four people in this piece work on completely different parts of the media machine. Talha Asad is thinking about the programming pipeline and the larger HBO brand. Nikhil Nair is thinking about rights, deal structures, and how each investment fits into Amazon’s universe. Jenn Dickey is connecting a gaming community to advertisers, partners, and other Amazon services. James Ruggerio is finding more ways for content libraries to reach people and generate revenue.
That is what worldbuilding looks like once a company moves past the idea and into the real work of operating at scale. It shows up in the rights deals, the advertising model, the product roadmap, the content calendar, and the partnerships that give people more than one way to participate.
The companies building the next generation of media will need more than a good product and an audience that cares. They will need an organization and business model capable of carrying that audience somewhere new along with them over time.
