Studio Systems · September 2026 · Pete Guzzo

I Started Building It Before I Knew Their Name.

The wild part about the Barstool Sports production at Shear Media Studios is that I started designing for it long before Barstool ever gave me the chance to bid.

I just didn't know it was Barstool yet.

Around mid-August, I was sitting across from a friend and industry colleague in his studio business center. We were talking shop, comparing jobs, talking production.

He looked at me and said, almost curiously:

"How the hell did you get Barstool Sports?"

I kind of grinned. Yeah. That was pretty cool.

Then he started doing what people in this business do. Friends, colleagues, competitors, frienemies — whatever you want to call us.

He started asking questions.

How did you land it? How are you running it? How did you build the workflow?

And honestly, my answer was pretty simple.

I started planning for it a long time ago.

Not Barstool specifically. A production like Barstool.

I wanted a studio operation that could handle a nimble podcaster or content creator one day, a national commercial the next, and then a recurring five-camera live broadcast without having to reinvent the entire building every time somebody new walked through the door.

And I wanted Plan B, C and D sitting behind Plan A.

I knew if I put this piece over here, that piece over there, connected the control room, network, studios, people and technology correctly, eventually it would become a pretty big sandbox for people to play in.

But somebody still had to put the sandbox together. That was my job.

Strategy

It Was Never Just the Room.

I helped design and strategize the studio around where I thought production was going, not just what clients were asking for that day.

Podcasting. Creator content. Commercial production. Episodic work. Live television. eSports. Remote production. Broadcast contribution without relying on traditional satellite workflows. SRT. A control room capable of talking to another control room hundreds of miles away.

And then I had to market it and sell it.

Because I don't believe in:

Build it and they will come.

You design it. Strategize it. Build it. Then make sure the right people understand what you built and why they need it.

Eventually, Barstool showed up.

Five cameras. Custom set. Weekly live production. Remote line cut. Signals moving between Tampa Bay and a broadcast operation in another city in real time.

Exactly the kind of production I had been thinking about.

So I sold it. Then we had to make the damn thing work.

The Transmission Test

Five Engineers Were Waiting.

Before the first show, we hit a network problem.

No static IP. Port forwarding. Routing. SRT. Transmission paths. Five engineers waiting on the other side for the test to clear.

I'm not a network engineer.

I'm the guy who sold the production and needed the network to work.

Fortunately, months earlier, I had started building my AI agents and CORTEX for exactly this kind of situation.

Not this exact problem. That's the point.

I was training the agents to handle the class of problem — no static IP, port forwarding, routing camera signals out of your building and into a broadcast ingest somewhere else. The kind of IT and network problem that stops a production in its tracks because the person who sold the show isn't a network engineer and the network engineers are waiting on the other end of a test call.

I was teaching them to do reconnaissance first. Read the documentation. Understand the environment. Figure out what matters. Then solve.

So I paired those agents with Codex, dug through our network architecture, worked through the routing and transmission path, and learned what I needed in real time.

The signal connected. The test cleared. The show went live.

The Team

But Technology Was Only Half of It.

A great system with the wrong people is still a bad system.

I also had to build the team around it.

Seasoned veterans. Younger crew members. People who knew broadcast. People still learning it. People who could work inside a recurring production without everything becoming dependent on one person knowing every answer.

That matters. Because a recurring production can't run on heroics every week.

The workflow has to be teachable. Repeatable. Everybody has to know where they fit.

And if somebody new comes in, the operation has to be strong enough to bring them up to speed.

That's the real sandbox. Not just cameras and control rooms.

People, technology and systems all working together.

The Point

Then It All Came Back Around.

Sitting across from my friend that day, I realized the answer to his question wasn't really:

"How did you get Barstool?"

It was:

I had been preparing for a Barstool before I knew Barstool was coming.

I designed the studio before I knew the client. Built the sales strategy before I knew the opportunity. Developed the AI agents before I knew the technical problem. Built the team before I knew exactly what production would test them. Then one day all of it met in the same room.

That's how I work. I don't design for one client.

I design so the right client can happen.

Build the capability. Build the team. Sell it. Solve what nobody anticipated. Then make sure the damn thing works.

Shear Media Studios is an approximately 15,000 sq. ft. multi-studio facility in St. Petersburg, FL — soundstages, podcast and influencer suites, a live-commerce environment, and a full broadcast control room. shearmediastudios.com

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