About Engines of Change
Engines of Change is where I map the collision of AI, media, and culture into something actionable. Not a hype feed. A strategy lens on how the infrastructure underneath media is shifting, how workflows are being rewired, and how stories get programmed into the systems that now shape our attention.
Here’s the bet the whole publication runs on: the durable value in this transition won’t accrue to the models. It will accrue to the layer above them — the orchestration, the standards, the governance, the place where creative choices meet technical defaults. Everyone is watching the models. I’m watching the control layer. That’s where the power is going to sit, and most of the industry is looking right past it.
I’ve spent two decades inside the media stack, and the pattern holds every time: the real transformation never happens at the surface. It happens in the layers — in data, in standards, in how a default setting quietly decides what a million people see. Engines of Change is my way of writing those layers out loud, so we can see where they connect and where they break.
What you’ll find here
System Alerts — short scans on the week’s signals and why they actually matter, not just that they happened.
Deep Cuts — longform essays on fandom, infrastructure, and programmable media. The pieces I’ve sometimes sat on for years before they were ready.
Sidebars & Notes — fast takes, ongoing conversations, and reference points between the bigger pieces.
I also use this space to test ideas before I bring them into boardrooms, industry standards groups, and startup roadmaps. Engines of Change is part publication, part lab; a place to practice making sense of the future before it shows up in production.
About me
I’m Andy Beach. I work at the intersection of AI, media technology, and storytelling, and I’ve been at the seam where the industry’s technical reality meets its commercial story for twenty-five years.
Most recently I was Worldwide CTO for Media & Entertainment at Microsoft, working with the largest broadcasters, studios, and sports leagues on the infrastructure decisions that determine how content gets made and distributed — including the OTT platform architecture that the NBA launched in 2021. Before that, the work was further upstream: the first HLS encoders for Major League Baseball, the first Smooth Streaming encoder used for Super Bowl and Olympics broadcasts, manifest-manipulation tooling that earned a Technical & Engineering Emmy. I wrote two practitioner books on video compression along the way, mostly because the explanations I wanted didn’t exist yet.
Today I run Alchemy Creations, a media strategy and advisory practice, and I’m a Venture Partner at Hallstone Ventures, where I help evaluate the founders building the next layer of this stack. Engines of Change is where I develop the thinking that feeds all of it.
If you’re building in this space, or trying to figure out how to position within it, this is the conversation I’d want to be having anyway. You’re welcome to read along.
Why Subscribe
Because you know infrastructure is culture; that the defaults, standards, and systems running underneath media quietly decide what a billion people see.
Because you’d rather understand where this is going than be blindsided by it.
Because you want signal that cuts deeper than the news cycle, from someone who’s been in the rooms where these decisions actually get made.
