How to Pitch Your Show for a Spot on PodcastsityTV

A network pitch works when it describes a show that already exists: a feed that validates it, a catalog of finished episodes, and a release schedule you have actually kept. Decks and sizzle reels come last.

Most advice on pitching a show to a network was written for Hollywood, and it will have you building a forty-page series bible for a program you have already made. That is the wrong document for a content creator-owned and operated website with a broadcast-style player. I’m not here developing your show.  I’m here to allow you to showcase it “like on TV-style”. I am the main deciding party on whether to carry it, which is a smaller question with much more specific answers.

Key takeaways

• I judge a pitch on five things in order: feed validity, catalog depth, cadence, rights, audience evidence.
• Your feed has to pass validation before anyone listens to an episode. That filter removes most submissions.
• The useful audience number is the median of your last ten episodes, not your total downloads or your subscriber count.
• A network slot is distribution and credibility. It is not money, and any pitch that assumes otherwise gets turned down.

Why the Hollywood pitch does not work here

For the professional Hollywood pitch: The standard package includes a logline, a six- or seven-page series bible covering characters and future episodes, a pilot script, and a pitch meeting you can only reach through an agent or manager. It exists because a studio is deciding whether to spend millions making something that does not exist yet.

We are deciding something narrower: whether a finished show earns a recurring place on a channel’s schedule. We can already hear everything a commissioner would want to imagine. So the pitch is not a promise. It is evidence.

That is good news for a solo creator, because evidence is cheap to assemble and doesn’t require anyone’s permission. It is bad news for anyone who has spent three months on a deck and three days on the actual episodes.

Two different doors: a slot or a placement

People conflate two things, and it wastes everyone’s time.

A placement is a single asset in a scheduled slot: a 40-second spot, a 90-second piece, a promo. It is a per-asset arrangement; it is paid, and the Featured Creator program explains the tiers and the review path. There is no revenue share in it and no promise about how many people will watch.

A slot is what this post is about: your existing series, carried as part of a channel’s lineup, episode after episode, for as long as the schedule holds.

The distinction matters because the paperwork is different. A placement needs one cleared asset. A slot needs a catalog with its rights in order, which is a bigger job and the reason most slot pitches fail late rather than early.

The five checks, in order

This is the actual sequence, not a marketing funnel. We stop at the first failure.

None of these are aesthetic judgments. Each one protects a schedule: a feed that breaks takes a channel offline, a show that stops publishing leaves a hole, and unclear rights create a takedown risk that lands on the network, not on you.

The technical gate: your feed has to validate

This is where most pitches die, and almost nobody expects it. Apple’s published feed requirements are specific: the feed has to follow RSS 2.0, be publicly addressable rather than password-protected, and give every episode a unique <enclosure> tag containing the file URL, the length and the type. Apple ignores duplicate enclosure URLs. Every episode needs a globally unique identifier that never changes, even if you move hosts.

There is more, and it is the part that gets overlooked: the server must be enabled for HTTP HEAD requests and byte-range requests so artwork and streaming playback work, filenames must be ASCII, and character entities in titles and descriptions need escaping. Fall short on any of it and you get feed validation errors, which means the submission is refused before a human reads the description.

Twenty minutes in a hosting dashboard fixes almost all of it. Do that before you write the email. If your recording setup is producing episodes at wildly different loudness, fix that too, because the first thing we do after the feed check is listen to two episodes back to back.

Audience evidence that survives a skeptical read

Start with the size of the field, because it calibrates everything else. The Podcast Index currently counts 4,750,354 podcasts, of which 466,597 published an episode in the last ninety days and 342,470 in the last thirty. Roughly one show in ten is actually running. Being in the index is not an achievement; publishing this month is a weak one.

So we ask for the number that requires work to inflate: the median downloads per episode across your last ten. A median ignores the episode a bigger show shared and ignores the launch spike, which is exactly why it is useful. Then we ask for retention or completion, because a show with modest downloads and strong completion is a better slot than a show with a famous guest and a two-minute average.

If your show runs on video, one threshold is worth knowing as a yardstick. YouTube’s Partner Program requires 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 qualified watch hours in the last twelve months, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last ninety days. That is platform-attested rather than self-reported, and it tells a programmer something a screenshot cannot. It is worth having for a second reason too: industry research compiled by Libsyn puts 44 percent of weekly podcast listeners naming YouTube as their primary platform, against 14 percent for Spotify and 5 percent for Apple Podcasts. A show with no video version is pitching to a smaller share of the audience than its host assumes.

One more number shapes the conversation. That same body of research reports that 32 percent of podcast creators stop producing permanently, so the question a programmer actually needs answered is what happens in month seven. Shows that answer it in the pitch, before being asked, tend to get a slot. The reasons shows lose listeners are usually structural rather than creative, and naming the ones you have already fixed is stronger evidence than any download figure.

Rights, releases and AI disclosure

A slot means the network distributes your work on a schedule, so the rights have to be boringly clear.

Music is the usual trap. The statutory licenses the U.S. Copyright Office administers cover cable and satellite retransmission, ephemeral recordings, digital audio transmission and mechanical reproduction of phonorecords. None of them is a general permission to drop a commercial recording into an on-demand episode. Use library music with a written license, or music you own, and keep the paperwork where you can find it.

Guests and contributors need consent at the time of recording, not a text message three weeks later. A one-paragraph release naming the show, the network, and the distribution rights costs nothing and prevents the worst version of this conversation.

AI-generated material needs disclosure, because it changes what the network has to check. Say which parts are generated, which tools produced them, and who holds the output. We have written before about what our own AI workflow looks like over on Creative Arts AI, and the honest version of that answer is more useful to a programmer than a claim that no AI was involved.

If any of those three is unresolved, the pitch waits. Not because the show is bad, but because a schedule cannot carry a question mark.

What the pitch email should contain

One page. Six items, in this order.

1. A subject line with the facts in it. Show name, the channel you are pitching, and your cadence. Not “Pitch” and not “Quick question.”
2. Three sentences on what the show is, written for someone who will not listen to episode one unless these land.
3. One line of numbers: episode count, median downloads over the last ten, and your release day.
4. Three links, no attachments: the feed URL, the single episode you would play first, and a one-page site. Anything that needs a login is not evidence.
5. A rights sentence covering music, guest releases and AI-generated material, in plain language.
6. What you are asking for: a slot on a named channel, starting on a named date, at the cadence you can actually hold.

No deck, no series bible, no vision statement. If the show is right, the conversation moves to a call within a week, and the deck you did not send saves you a month. If you are pitching a one-off asset rather than a series, the money side of running a show is a separate article and a separate conversation.

What we turn down, and why

• Idea-only pitches. There is nothing to schedule.
• “We will build the audience together.” PodcastsityTV is a distribution channel, not a marketing agency. Any marketing agency or network that promises to make you famous is selling you something [waterfront property in Arizona, perhaps].
• Exclusivity demanded before airtime. Fair to ask for a term once a slot is in place. Not as the opening condition.
• A large back catalog with no clearance documents. Two hundred episodes is an asset until the music becomes a problem.
• Volume with no human edit. Fast AI output is not the disqualifier. Unreviewed output is, because it is what puts PodcastsityTV’s credibility and yours at risk.
• The same email to every channel. If the pitch does not name the channel and say why the show fits it, it reads as bulk mail and gets treated that way.

Pitching your show FAQs

How do I pitch a show to a network?

Lead with the show that exists. Give the feed URL, an episode count, a median per-episode download figure, your release day, and a rights statement, in one page. Leave the deck out until someone asks for it.

Do I need a finished show before pitching?

For a slot, yes. One or a few published or unpublished episodes is a fair floor, because as a program-driven site we just need to know you have enough material for twenty-five to thirty minutes.  An idea on its own has nothing to schedule.

What should a pitch email include?

A factual subject line, three sentences on the show, one line of numbers, three links, a rights sentence, and a clear ask naming the channel and start date. No attachments that need a login and no vision statement.

Does PodcastsityTV pay for content?

No. A slot is distribution and editorial placement, not a production budget, and there is no revenue share attached. Paid Featured Creator placements exist separately and are reviewed on their own terms.

Can I pitch an AI-generated show?

Yes, with disclosure. Name which parts are generated, which tools produced them, and who holds the output, and confirm a human edit pass on every episode. Unreviewed output is the disqualifier, not the AI.

Send it to the right channel

Pick one channel, name it in the subject line, and send the six items in order. If the feed validates and the last ten episodes are steady, you will hear back. Everything else in the pitch is detail.

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