Walk the floor at NAB in Las Vegas, IBC in Amsterdam, or Inter BEE in Tokyo and you will pass thousands of companies whose products quietly run the world's television: routers, intercoms, playout servers, graphics engines, transmitters. Now try to find a single place that maps who they are, what they actually ship, and who they are hiring.
You will not find one. That gap is why I started building MediaLinkPro.
The problem: institutional knowledge in PDF form
Broadcast is an industry where critical knowledge lives in exhibitor catalogs, trade-show booth conversations, and the heads of veteran engineers. When a chief engineer needs to replace an aging vision mixer, the research process looks the same as it did in 2005: ask around, collect brochures, email sales reps.
Meanwhile, every other industry got structured discovery platforms. Developers have package registries. Startups have product directories. Broadcast — a sector measured in tens of billions — kept the brochures.
The shape of the data
The core of MediaLinkPro is a deliberately boring, deliberately strict data model:
- Organizations — the companies, from the giants to the two-person signal-processing shops.
- Flagship products — not the full catalog; the products a company would put on its booth banner. Curation is the feature.
- Job postings — because hiring signals are the most honest indicator of where the industry is actually heading.
The discipline is in what gets left out. Every directory that tries to capture everything becomes a swamp. One flagship product per company forces the question that matters: what is this company actually about?
Lessons from building it solo
A few things this project keeps teaching me:
- Seed data is product design. The first hundred companies define the tone of the whole platform. I sourced them from real exhibitor lists across the three major shows, then cleaned every entry by hand.
- Logos are surprisingly hard. Square, legible, non-transparent, consistently lit — a real pipeline problem that no one warns you about.
- An empty directory is a broken promise. A platform like this has to launch feeling inhabited, or it never gets a second visit.
Where it is going
The near-term roadmap is focused: deeper company profiles, product comparisons that respect engineers' intelligence, and a jobs layer that treats broadcast careers as first-class. The long-term ambition is simpler to state: when someone in this industry asks "who makes X?", the answer should take ten seconds, not ten emails.
Broadcast gave me my start. MediaLinkPro is how I give the map back.