TellyCast: The content industry podcast
Episodes
280 episodes
The Sidemen's guide to creating superstar formats
Victor Bengtsson runs production at Sidemen Entertainment. In this episode, recorded at the TellyCast Digital Content Forum 2025, he explains how the company built Inside, a Big Brother-style format developed with no TV experience and no format...
Jungle Creations: how social brands become real world businesses
Jungle Creations built an audience of 145 million followers across a portfolio of social-first media brands. The harder question, and the one Siobhan McDade has spent the past few years answering, is what you do with that audience once the plat...
Andy Wilman on Rebooting The Grand Tour
This week Justin Crosby is joined by Andy Wilman, the producer behind Top Gear, The Grand Tour and Clarkson's Farm, for a conversation about handing the format to a new generation.The Grand Tour returns to Prime Video on 4 September with...
Factual Futures: Who Owns the Audience?
Is uploading a documentary to YouTube really a route to serious money? At the TellyCast Digital Content Forum 2025, Lucy Smith (Fawkes Digital) chairs a panel of factual specialists working across the creator economy: Gerrit Kemming (founder an...
Money Talks: Inside the New Wave of Social Video Investment
Ahead of the TellyCast Digital Content Forum returning to BFI Southbank on 5 November, we're revisiting one of last year's standout sessions.Daniel Winner chairs a conversation with three of the most active investors in creator and socia...
Emma Walker, Curly Media: why brands became the new commissioners
Emma Walker founded Curly Media in January 2022, after deciding she did not want to spend her career in a television industry that was contracting around her. Three and a half years on, the agency has made Spotify's Wrapped campaign in the UK, ...
Ben Powell-Jones on Strong Watch Studios, A Comedy Thing and Why TV and Digital Are Becoming One Industry
Three years after ex-LADbible executives Ben Powell-Jones and Thom Gulseven launched Strong Watch Studios with backing from Hat Trick Productions' Jimmy Mulville, the digital-first studio is delivering for Channel 4, the BBC and Netflix - and h...
Cannes Lions Special: AI, IP and Brand-Led Content | Luma AI, Studio 55, Aardman
Recorded on the ground at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, this Cannes special closes the current series of TellyCast before the summer break. Host Justin Crosby meets three guests working at the point where advertising, e...
How to Build a Billion-View Entertainment Brand
What does it take to build one of the UK’s most successful branded entertainment franchises?This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by Mark Rivers, co-founder of Cold Glass Productions, the company behind the award-winning Di...
How to build a digital-first production company
What does it really take to build a production company for the creator economy?This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by production strategist Bryony Hopkins, founder of BRYONY Ink, whose career...
Is Hollywood Broken? Peter White on YouTube, Netflix and the Future of TV
This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by Peter White, Executive Editor at Deadline, for a wide-ranging conversation covering the biggest issues facing the global content business.Peter shares his perspective from Los Ang...
.png)
From Gold Rush to YouTube, AI and the Future of TV Production
What happens when two experienced television producers decide to leave the traditional TV industry and build a digital-first business from scratch?In this episode of TellyCast, Justin Crosby sits down with Pete Campion, Co-Founder of Ind...
.png)
The Business of True Crime: Building IP Beyond Television
This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by Naomi Channell, Head of Podcasts at Curve Media and creator of some of the UK’s fastest-growing true crime podcasts.Naomi shares her journey from a 20-year career in television productio...
Andrew Eastel on Building Digital-First IP Beyond Broadcast
This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by Andrew Eastel, Managing Director of Middlechild Productions, for a fascinating conversation about how traditional TV production companies can adapt to the digital-first production economy.<...
How Spotify Is Turning Podcasts Into the New TV Industry
Spotify is no longer just an audio platform. Video podcasts are now at the centre of its growth strategy — and according to Spotify’s Rowan Collinson, they are rapidly becoming one of the most important opportunities in the digital-first produc...
Inside Time Team’s Digital Reboot with Tim Taylor MBE
Recorded live at How to Make Money in Digital on April 20th 2026, this episode of TellyCast features Tim Taylor MBE, the creator of Time Team, in a candid conversation about bringing one of the UK’s most beloved factual format...
How Micro Drama Is Rewriting TV: COL Group’s Timothy Oh on the Future of Vertical Storytelling
This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby speaks to Timothy Oh from COL Group, one of the biggest players in the booming micro drama business.As the company behind platforms including ReelShort, Timothy explains why short-form, vertical stor...
How Spirit Studios Is Building a Digital-First Super Indie
This week on TellyCast, Justin Crosby sits down with Matt Campion, co-founder of Spirit Studios, for a deep dive into how one of the UK’s most established digital-first production companies is building for the future.Matt explains how Sp...
How TV Producers Can Actually Make Money in Digital
The TV industry is changing fast, and traditional production models are no longer enough. In this episode of TellyCast, recorded live at How to Make Money in Digital, Anjdy Fry digs into what the digital-first production economy really looks li...
Why micro-dramas exploded in China
Justin Crosby speaks to Chinese micro-drama expert Wenwen Han, founder and CEO of the Short Drama Alliance, about how China built the world’s most advanced short-form drama economy. The conversation explores platform ecosystems on...
The Secret Digital Producers
In this anonymous edition of TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by two experienced digital-first producers who speak candidly about the realities of building sustainable businesses in social video, YouTube and podcasting in 2026.
Micro Drama, Vertical Storytelling and the New Scripted Economy
Micro drama is one of the fastest-growing scripted formats in global digital video, and UK producers are only just beginning to understand its scale, speed and commercial potential.In this episode of TellyCast, Justin Crosby is ...
Steve Ackerman: The Future of Audio, Video and the New Podcast Economy
This week Justin is joined by Steve Ackerman, one of the UK’s leading audio execs and former EVP and Head of Global Podcasts at Sony Music. Steve talks through three decades of shaping audio, from starting in hospital radio to building Somethin...
The State of Digital-First in 2025 and What Comes Next in 2026
In this special end-of-year episode of TellyCast, Justin Crosby looks back at 2025 and unpacks the structural shifts that have quietly but fundamentally reshaped the digital-first production economy.Drawing on reporting from The Drop, co...
How Brands Become Broadcasters: Joe Churchill on Branded Entertainment, Creators and the Future of Social Video
In this episode of TellyCast, Justin Crosby is joined by Joe Churchill, former Digital Commissioning Editor for Branded Content at Channel 4 and now co-founder of Fan Club, a digital-first agency built around brands, creators and premium social...