Season one · Free to enter · Upstate New York
OPT Spotlight
Upstate New York's poetry & comedy talent search — Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, the Finger Lakes, and everywhere in between. Your talent deserves a bigger stage: submit your performance, get featured on OPT TV, win the public vote, and perform live in Rochester on Sunday, August 16. Win cash and keep every right to your work. No entry fee. No fine-print rights grab. Just a stage.
Live outside Upstate NY? Enter At-Large: no cash prize, but standout at-large sets get featured on OPTtv under our standard creator deal.
Two categories
Stand-Up Comedy
Up to 7 minutes
One continuous set, recorded anywhere — a club, your garage, your kitchen. We judge the material and the delivery, not the venue.
Spoken Word & Poetry
Up to 5 minutes
Original poetry, spoken word, or storytelling — performed to camera. Bring the words; any backdrop will do.
What winners get 🏆
- $250 cash — one winner per category (two winners total)
- Distribution on OPTtv — your set streams on our apps, web, and TV
- Winner spotlight — featured placement + promotion across Optimistic Media
- You keep your rights — our license is non-exclusive, always
And it's not winner-take-all: every strong entry gets offered our
standard creator deal — non-exclusive streaming with revenue share. The
contest is a doorway, not a lottery ticket.
How winners are chosen:
approved entries stream publicly at tv.optimisticmedia.net, where anyone with a free
OPTtv account can vote August 4–7 (one vote per entry per person, with
anti-fraud protections). Public votes pick the Top 5 per category
(ten finalists in all — five comedy, five poetry),
who then perform at OPT Spotlight Live in Rochester on Sunday,
August 16 — a judging panel scores the live sets on the published
criteria and winners are crowned that night. Panel decisions are final.
Fair-vote promise: voting requires a free account with a
verified sign-in, the database enforces one vote per entry per person, and
network-level limits with anomaly detection catch vote-stuffing — flagged
votes never count, and we store network identifiers only as one-way hashes
(never raw IP addresses). Buying an event ticket has no effect on voting
or judging. Full disclosure in the
Official Rules.
Season 1 dates
- Entries open July 20, 2026
- Entries close Monday, August 3, 2026 · 11:59 PM Eastern Time
- Public voting August 4–7, 2026 · vote at tv.optimisticmedia.net
- Finalists announced Saturday, August 8, 2026 · Top 5 per category (10 finalists), by public vote
- 🎤 OPT SPOTLIGHT LIVE Sunday, August 16, 2026 · the 10 finalists (5 comedy, 5 poetry) perform live in Rochester · 18+ · ticket details coming soon
- Winners announced live at the showcase
How to enter
- Record your set — landscape video, decent audio, one continuous take preferred. MP4, 1080p if you can.
- Upload it anywhere private-but-shareable (Google Drive, Dropbox, unlisted YouTube).
- Submit the link through the official
entry form by August 3 at 11:59 PM ET. (Prefer email? Send it to
hello@optimisticmedia.netwith subjectOPT Spotlight — ComedyorOPT Spotlight — Poetry.)
Before you hit send — the three rules that disqualify most entries anywhere:
- Music must be yours or cleared. No performing over commercial tracks — this is the #1 disqualifier.
- Everything original. Your material, written by you. Anyone visible on camera has consented.
- 18+ and U.S. residents for Season 1. AI-generated material must be disclosed.
Entering means you agree to the Official Rules.
Free to enter. No purchase necessary. Judged on skill.
Local business? Sponsor OPT Spotlight →