The Vision Exercise, Worked: From Starlink to a Sports Streaming Thesis

My four answers, the line that connected them, and what they pointed me toward.

In the previous article, I laid out a four-question exercise for generating a vision. A method is only useful if it produces something real, so here are my four answers, unvarnished, and the line they drew when I put them next to each other.

I am writing this in the first person because the exercise is supposed to be personal. The output should sound like a person you know, not a generic prediction anyone with a Bloomberg terminal could have written.

Answer One. The Technology That Impresses Me

Starlink.

The satellites get the headlines. The bigger story is what they dissolve.

Bandwidth scarcity has shaped almost every assumption we carry about media, communication, and where people are allowed to live and work. You have to be near a fiber line. Rural areas get worse internet. Big events need pre-installed infrastructure. Remote work is for places with cell towers. All of that is the same assumption wearing different clothes.

Starlink makes the assumption obsolete. Almost every business model, broadcast format, and remote-work argument we have today was designed around bandwidth being expensive and scarce. When that goes away, so do the rules built on top of it. The places that always had scarce bandwidth are where the new patterns will show up first. Watch those.

Answer Two. The Aha From Five Years Ago

Sometime between 2010 and 2015, a friend told me that a day was coming when you could watch any game in the country at any time. High school football. Little League baseball. Adult rec leagues. Anything.

I thought he was wrong. I had five hundred cable channels and I couldn't picture the economics working. Who would film the games? Who would distribute them? Who would pay for the bandwidth?

Today my family uses GameChanger to watch youth baseball from the bleachers a thousand miles away. Hudl streams high school football. YouTube Live carries games that used to be locked in a single gym. The infrastructure that made it impossible in 2012 (cameras, bandwidth, distribution, storage) collapsed in price and improved in quality. The economics worked.

The real lesson is that the trajectory was visible if I had bothered to look. Cheap cameras plus cheap bandwidth plus cheap storage equals decentralized broadcasting. My friend looked at the same data I had. He just took it seriously.

Answer Three. The Passion

Helping former corporate professionals at my stage of life build the second act they actually want.

Not a downshift. Not retirement consulting. A real business that finishes the dream better than the first half of the career suggested. Twenty plus years of pattern recognition, no longer constrained by corporate ladders, building something durable that pays well, runs on your terms, and uses what you actually learned in those Fortune 500 jobs.

I keep coming back to this even when I am not getting paid to think about it. That's a signal. The crowd of mid-career operators who quietly want a second act is enormous, underserved, and skeptical of every coach and consultant pitching them on the dream. They deserve better tools and a clearer playbook.

Answer Four. The Job That Did Not Exist Five Years Ago

My daughter recently applied for a job as a TikTok influencer for a local soda shop.

The role: take viral trends and execute them on brand for the business. The soda shop already has a marketing person. They use Canva. They have TikTok and Instagram accounts. What my daughter brings is the ability to translate the current trend cycle into authentic content that fits the brand voice.

That role did not exist five years ago. It exists now, in a small business in a small town, posted on a normal hiring page. And it is one of dozens of new niches inside marketing that the platforms have created in the last few years. Trend translator. Comment-section moderator turned community manager. Short-form video editor for plumbers. Voice-over artist for AI-generated avatars.

When people ask what the jobs of the future look like, they are looking too far ahead. The answer is already visible in what teenagers and young adults are being hired to do this quarter.

Drawing the Line

Put the four answers next to each other.

1. Starlink is dissolving bandwidth and geographic constraints.
2. The sports aha proves decentralized broadcasting already happened at the amateur level.
3. Passion for independent operators building durable businesses outside legacy institutions.
4. New job categories appearing inside the creator and platform economy.

The line that connects these four points is one I would not have written down without the exercise. The unbundling of live broadcast is not finished. It is mid-cycle. GameChanger and Hudl serving youth sports is the smaller earlier version of what comes next.

Sports media has been getting closer to fans for twenty years. ESPN and the broadcast networks owned the experience for a long time. Then guys like Pat McAfee proved that one person with a microphone and a point of view could build an audience that rivals an entire network. Today a wave of local college football podcasters cover their school full time from a one-bedroom apartment, with press credentials and sideline passes their predecessors at the magazines never had access to. Each step put the production capability further out from the institutions and closer to the fans.

The next step is the live broadcast itself. Not post-game commentary. Not a preview podcast on Tuesday. An actual live game broadcast, produced from a bedroom on a Friday night, that feels like a college broadcast on Saturday afternoon.

Picture a Friday night next fall. A 6A playoff game. Several people are already broadcasting it independently. The school is running a Hudl feed for free. The booster club has a YouTube stream from their own camera in the stands. The visiting team has their own stream going. A handful of parents are live-streaming from their phones. And a new niche of independent operators has emerged who do live sideline streams as their own thing: they walk the field, talk to families, catch the moments the wide shots miss.

The aggregator is a guy in his mid-twenties who grew up in this town. He is not running cameras himself. He is running a live broadcast by stitching the existing feeds together. The Hudl stream is his main camera. The booster club feed is his crowd shot. A parent's phone is his end-zone angle. He is on a call with a sideline streamer he met through a creator network last spring, and together they trade off coverage like a two-person booth. He calls the plays. She catches the reactions and pulls in player parents for thirty-second interviews between possessions. By halftime the broadcast feels like a Saturday afternoon college game.

That cooperation is the new thing. The technology to split a live broadcast between two independent operators used to live in a control truck. Now it runs on a laptop and a phone. The aggregator is not building a team. He is finding partners. Two creators growing two audiences inside one product.

The technology to do this exists today. The rights questions usually come next: who owns the Hudl feed, who can simulcast it, what happens when fans are live-streaming from the stands. Those questions always get asked late. Sports talk radio built audiences around games it didn't own. Twitch built a billion-dollar industry on top of other people's video games before the publishers wrote creator-friendly clauses into their terms. Audience comes first. Rights frameworks settle in afterward.

Someone is going to build this role. The only open question is who.

The Turn That Matters

The same exercise did two things for me at once.

It pointed at a market thesis (the next role in live broadcast is a creator-aggregator who runs a real game broadcast by cooperating with other independent streamers). It also pointed at a personal vision (helping former corporate operators build second acts using tools and partnerships that did not exist five years ago).

Those two outcomes are downstream of the same pattern. Institutions are losing their monopoly on what they used to control. Independent operators are stepping into the gap, and the new tools let them cooperate with each other instead of waiting to be hired by an institution. Sports broadcasting. Marketing. Education. Local commerce. The pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

That is what the exercise actually does. It surfaces the pattern that has been quietly organizing your attention for years and gives you language for it.

Try It

Write your four answers down. Look for the line. Then tell me what you found.

The method works for companies and for people. For the executive setting direction for a team, it produces a real thesis. For the individual trying to figure out the next chapter, it produces a real direction. The exercise doesn't care which problem you bring to it.

This is what Phase One Vision looks like inside the Execution Index: the same muscle that lets you see where live broadcast is heading is the muscle that lets you see where your transformation initiative will stall three quarters before it does.

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FAQ

What does a real vision exercise look like when someone takes it seriously? It looks like four short answers about technology, hindsight, passion, and an emerging job, followed by a deliberate attempt to find the line that connects them. The output is not a slogan or a strategy deck. It is a specific thesis about where the world is going that you can name in one or two sentences and defend with evidence from your own observations.

Where is live sports streaming going next? The unbundling of live broadcast is mid-cycle. Schools already post Hudl streams. Booster clubs run their own cameras. Fans live-stream from their phones. What's missing is the role that pulls those independent feeds together into one product. Picture a live broadcast of a Friday night high school playoff game, produced from a creator's bedroom, with a sideline streamer he met through a creator network handling reactions and interviews. Two independent operators cooperating on one game. That role does not exist yet at scale. The technology is there. The role is empty.

How do you find your next business idea using this exercise? Run the four questions honestly and look at the answers together. Your business idea usually lives at the intersection of a constraint that is dissolving (Question One), a trajectory you have already lived through (Question Two), a passion that pulls you (Question Three), and a category of work that did not exist five years ago (Question Four). The intersection is rarely obvious until you put the answers side by side.