This site has been a quiet place. A post in 2014 about why LIVE matters. A few in 2019 — a milestone, and a rant written on a plane out of Rio. A look at UX last year. The archive tells the truth: I wrote when something demanded to be written, and the rest of the time I was busy doing the work.
That’s about to change, and I want to say why.
Three transitions at once
Our industry has never been standing still — I’ve spent 25+ years watching it move, from tape melts to files, SD to HD, hardware to software, copper to IP. But something is different now: the transitions have stopped taking turns. The move to software and cloud, the collapse of the broadcast schedule into streaming-everything, and the arrival of AI into workflows we thought were settled… all at once, all accelerating, all colliding.
I’ve been through enough of these waves to know what the middle of one feels like. The noise is loudest, the snake oil flows freest, and the practitioner voices — the people who’ve actually stood in the truck when the theory met the tally light — tend to go quiet, because they’re busy keeping it on the air.
A seat at the table, not a booth at the show
Most of what gets written about our industry is written by someone selling something. I’ve read a career’s worth of it. This will be the other kind: what’s real, what’s hype, and what actually matters when the show is live — from someone who has installed it, broken it, fixed it, and shipped it.
So here’s the plan for this place. Three threads, running steadily: where our industry is genuinely heading, an honest practitioner’s view of AI in media workflows, and the lessons a career in live production teaches you about leadership, pressure, and craft. I’ve spent this summer writing them down, and I’ll be publishing steadily in the weeks ahead.
Let’s drop a waypoint, one more time: the industry that taught me everything is renegotiating everything it knows. The least I can do is write down what I’ve learned while it happens — and maybe save someone a few of the lessons I paid full price for.
Welcome back to pflugtv. The red light is on.
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