Meet the “ambassador of live” shows

^{Making a living as a creator shouldn’t be some elusive thing. And what’s the best way to learn how creators are making it work? To go behind-the-scenes. These weekly interview issues are like having coffee with your favorite creators. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about solopreneurship and the creator economy.}

Good morning. This week’s creator left cable news to bet on live video, and is building the shows that turn passive viewers into active communities. Here’s why every niche might need its own live show.

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Taylor Craig learned live TV the hard way. While still in college in Florida, Craig wrote for the morning news at a Miami local station on a shift that started at 2:30am, for $12 an hour. It was brutal, but it taught him how to write, and how to love the chaos of a newsroom.

Craig wanted to do network, so he moved to New York, where he spent time at Fox Business, Cheddar News, then CNBC – where he helped launch Last Call with Brian Sullivan until the 7pm show was shelved.

Instead of applying for another network job, Craig took the severance and asked the smartest people in the industry where media was heading. He started Launch Live Now with a best friend and former roommate, a little over two years ago.

“As somebody who was approaching 30, I really wanted to be in a growth space and not a space that was just fighting for survival,” Craig said.

Launch Live Now is a white-label production firm building TV-caliber live shows for creators, brands, and publishers. 

Craig wasn’t the only one leaving, though Launch Live Now stays out of the politics that defined some of the bigger breakouts.

“Talent is understanding that they're not going to get those massive contracts that were given out in the '90s. There's only a select few that are going to get them,” Craig said.

The smart move is a contract carve-out for your own podcast and an audience you own. “The TV talent that understand that are going to be the ones that benefit.”

Launch Live Now produces Daily Dealer Live for Car Dealership Guy and Letterland Live for the newsletter world. “I just think niche casting has so many directions to go,” Craig said.

Publishers are up next. Fifteen years ago, The New York Times might have shrugged at a podcast; now The Daily is one of the world’s most consumed shows. Live is the next step.

You don’t need a CNN control room to compete. 

Craig is a producer first and foremost, who has come to love the sales and customer relations side. He shows a prospect what’s possible, they’re a little overwhelmed, and nothing happens. “Then six months later, I get a call frantically, like, let's do a show. Can you launch in two weeks?”

The build takes three to four weeks. Craig works with the client’s brand designers on every detail. E.g. fonts, lower thirds, a headline scroll, how CNN does it and what they could do differently. After that it’s close to plug and play. Most shows run on a weekly cadence, and the majority of clients have been on air for more than a year.

Shows run on OBS, an open-source streaming tool, rather than platforms like Riverside or StreamYard. Craig gives those tools credit for ease of use, but thinks feeds will soon be full of templated-looking streams. “The ones that actually look like professional shows are going to go to the top of the pile.”

Show day takes about three and a half hours, which includes two hours of prep, one hour live and simulcast across platforms, and a podcast version out within 15 to 30 minutes of wrapping. Every show gets at least two producers, and every process is documented so the company can scale.

The best live shows have a game: something ongoing the audience tracks, like the stock market. 

The other edge is speed. A host can react to a story the moment it breaks, even mid-show. Recorded content waits on an editor and might land days or a week later. A Launch Live Now show is archived on every platform the second it ends.

Craig thinks the industry is over-focused on views. The real measure is engagement, and live’s real power is community. A good live show becomes a watering hole, where viewers gather around a topic and talk to each other, not just the host.

A recent ARK Invest stream on SpaceX and Tesla earnings drew a “bonkers” comment section debating robotics and Tesla’s valuation. On Daily Dealer Live, regulars have become characters in their own right.

Launch Live Now pulls comments from YouTube, X, Instagram and TikTok onto the screen mid-show, with producers choosing what goes on air. “The audience literally can say something insightful, and screw whatever we had planned.”

Craig sees social media and TV converging. Instagram is testing live streams in the Reels tab, so discovery goes beyond the red circle on accounts you already follow. X has tested a TV app, YouTube gets most of its watch time on televisions, and Netflix is courting YouTube creators. Roku and others won’t sit on the sidelines either.

The result, Craig predicts, will be fierce competition and something of a bidding war for TV-caliber live programming. He plans to explore ad sales and syndication deals to make live programming even more lucrative. He believes it’s still early days and CMOs should get in now. 

As for the shows themselves, Craig’s advice is to go all in. “Produce the hell out of it. Make it look amazing. You're never going to regret having better-looking stuff, even if different fads come and go.”

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