John Stamos debated live-streaming his first tattoo at SXSW: Is the future of media ‘life in real-time’?

Actor John Stamos is thinking a lot more about potential opportunities to live-stream these days—be it at New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade, performing with the Beach Boys when he heads to Route 66 for the 100-year anniversary later this year, or even while getting his first-ever tattoo in Austin for SXSW. 

“I thought, ‘Oh, we should have live-streamed that,” said Stamos, speaking at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “That could have been interesting watching me go through that kind of pain.”

As chief innovation officer of Zeam, a startup that lets people stream local TV stations and other content from anywhere, Stamos is excited to bring people an alternative to what he sees as an abundance of homogenized and overproduced content right now. 

WHAT AUDIENCES WANT

“Where do we go for just fresh, authentic content with no agenda?” Stamos said. “We’re giving people freedom to be authentic and to be real—and I think that’s what audiences want right now.”

What’s more, Zeam will open up new opportunities for local TV stations to live-stream content that might be of interest to people beyond their markets—say, the annual balloon festival in Albuquerque or what’s happening in a city ahead of a NASCAR race.

That’s according to Jack Perry, the company’s founder and CEO. Zeam gives local stations the technology to focus on creating content, removing barriers of cost and complexity.

Whether live-streaming a comedian’s trek around Michigan for five straight days or a concert with the Empire State Building as backdrop, Zeam is proving that there is an audience somewhere for anything.

Consider this: Within an hour of Stamos appearing in a commercial during the 2025 Super Bowl to promote Zeam, 33,000 people had downloaded the app and were watching a live-stream of the company’s truck driving around Las Vegas. 

“People like life in real-time and we’re going to give them life in real-time,” Perry said. “We should stop focusing on what people are watching, just that they’re watching something that we’ve put onto our platform that makes it easy for them.”

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