SimonTV Hiatus

Concluded for 2025. Back in January

Thank you for the pleasure of your company on Sunday evenings throughout the year.

I’ve really enjoyed doing a weekly live show, which is very different to the hyper-local video news content I’m more well known for producing. I really like the realtime audience interaction and many of my guests have remarked that they too, enjoy a platform where they can engage directly with the audience. In my opinion the secret sauce of SimonTV LIVE is its participatory format, a very different proposition to the traditional active/passive, presenter/consumer paradigm of broadcast television and most podcasts.

Numbers fluctuate wildly but it’s been great to watch the show grow. It’s averaging a live audience of around 3,500 across the seven or eight social media platforms I simulcast to, with typically a few hundred more watching on replay. This is a much smaller audience than the millions (and tens of millions) of viewers some of my footage from events receive but it’s a lot more satisfying to do. I think because it’s interactive there’s a sense of community, Sunday evenings is time I spend with my friends.

I’ve started clipping out and subtitling highlight clips of 1-2 minute duration, more suitable for the video platforms like Tiktok and Instagram, and for those who don’t have the time to watch the full-length show. These have proved surprisingly popular and have reached different audiences. I’m going to try to increase the frequency of these.

I’m always keen to innovate and improve, and I’m always open to suggestions for alterations to the format or guests I should invite on. SimonTV is collaborative and the audience contributions are always, always welcome.

Thanks again for tuning into my regularly scheduled nonsense and for tolerating my frequent mistakes. I’ll be back once again, new and improved, on the 4th of January and I’m very much looking forward to seeing you all then.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, to you and to yours.

-SRA. Auckland, 4/xii 2025.