I left my job as an Executive Producer in 2024 and, strangely, never once considered just applying for another full time job.
It only really hit me mid last year, when I stopped and thought about it properly - and then laughed. Because, of course, that's exactly what any rational or mildly sensible person would have done. Line something new up. For reasons I still can't fully explain, that option just.. didn't register.
On paper, things were going super well. I'd spent years building production hubs in both the UK and New York, working across a steady stream of TV movies (a lot of them - truly, a lot). You can now watch most of them on Paramount+, if that's your cup of tea! And I loved it. There's something uniquely satisfying about seeing a project move from script to screen, knowing you've helped steer it into existence.
But if I'm being honest, the part that fascinated me most wasn't just the storytelling - it was the mechanisms behind it. The deals. The building blocks of financing masking as the choreography of filmmaking that determines what actually gets made.
I studied History and English Literature, so I've always been drawn to storytelling. But somewhere along the way, I became just as interested in the economics of narrative production. Who decides which stories are told? Why those ones? And how, as an EP, was I responsible for managing what the 'buyer' wanted, probably even more so than managing the creative elements of the films themselves?
The answer was that these buyers, these platforms… they weren't just distributors. They were gatekeepers, financiers, tastemakers. They held the keys to facilitating creativity at scale. I liked that. There was just one small issue: my career had been far too TV movie centric (and, frankly, for better or worse, I was continually deemed too young) to be taken seriously for a commissioning role at any of the major platforms.
So I did what, in hindsight, felt like the most obvious and simultaneously least logical thing at the same time - I decided to build one.
My personal viewing tastes have always leaned heavily toward historical drama, and I knew there was an audience for it, so I started looking at niche streaming platforms I'd previously worked with - Shudder, Acorn, BritBox - and thought: how hard could it be to do this for historical content?
It turns out: quite hard.
Especially when you don't have a large fund, big network or any real safety net behind you.
Marginally easier, however, if you happen to be related to a particularly clever software engineer. Although it still makes me chuckle thinking about the first time I phoned David saying I'd had this idea to build a streaming platform - I got a solid "good luck" - little did he know!
So, the first mountain to climb was tech. Not just "build a website" tech - (shout out to the Lovable fans of which I am now fully one myself) - but building a platform that could properly support licensing structures, deliver genuinely smooth, low-latency, DRM friendly streaming, and - crucially, of course - have a very satisfying timebar UI. If you know, you know. If you don't… well, why haven't you subscribed yet?!
We weren't, and will never be, trying to reinvent Netflix. We were building something specific and intentional - something that respected both the content and the viewer. Unfortunately, it's hard to raise big, big investment when everyone assumes you can roll out an MVP using AI and then also assumes you are trying to be Netflix but have somehow got your market size really, really wrong. (Shoutout to the investors who did understand what we were doing, and chose to back us at this point).
Then came licensing, which is in fact where a healthy combination of logic and optimism goes to be stress-tested. :)
As a new, standalone platform, we had no leverage. No track record. No audience data. Just a pitch, a vision, and a lot of persistence. We focused on non-exclusive SVOD rights in the UK, assuming that the potential of an additional revenue stream on that menial licensing basis, and exposure to an audience who actually cared about what we were licensing, would be welcome.
There were moments - quite a few, actually - where it felt genuinely impossible. The kind of moments where every email thread goes quiet at once, and you start questioning whether you've misunderstood the entire industry you thought you knew inside and out.
But slowly, things moved. One deal became two. Two became ten. The catalogue started to take shape. The tech worked. C21 Media ran a feature on us.
And then, in November 2024, we launched.
Today, Yoreflix has around 100 hours of licensed content. It's available directly on your TV via Amazon Fire Stick and Google TV, with more Smart TV apps on the way. Which is still slightly surreal.
Because less than a year ago, this was just an idea I was quietly trying to convince myself wasn't totally unrealistic. The broader industry, meanwhile, is in a strange place. Redundancies are everywhere. Projects are being passed on more often than they're being greenlit. And large-scale M&A seems to be the dominant strategy—consolidation over experimentation. Which is precisely why doing something new, focused, and slightly unconventionally ambitious feels important. In a landscape full of "no," we're building something that creates its own version of "yes."
As we look ahead - to launching in the US and Canada, rolling out across more Smart TV platforms, and building affiliate partnerships to get our now fully fledged streaming platform out there to all history lovers - I can't help but think that the version of me in October 2024, wondering if any of this would actually work, would be pretty proud.