Centrell Reed remembers the moment she decided the move to Houston was worth the gamble. Her sister had been urging her to consider, but Reed was skeptical.
“I was like, why would I do that?” she recalls. “I mean, Houston’s got to figure out its life. You all have hazards, the zoning’s all over the place, there are too many people.”
But her sister planted a seed and told her that they “could do so many big things here.”
Over a decade later, that instinct proved prophetic. Reed, a New Orleans native who spent 14 years as a certified project manager in financial technology, now runs CReed Global Media, a full-service media company that provides streaming technology, video production, and distribution services to clients ranging from city governments to independent filmmakers.
She also founded and chairs the International Entertainment Partnership (IEP), an organization that brings together Houston’s entertainment community to compete with major markets such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York.
Growing Houston’s entertainment industry ecosystem
Reed’s work addresses a critical gap: Houston, the fourth-largest and most diverse city in America, has been losing its creative talent to other markets. When she opened her 4,000-square-foot studio in 2018, it became the largest in Houston, a shocking reality for someone who had lived in Los Angeles and Atlanta, where studios span 30,000, 50,000, and even 100,000 square feet.
CReed Global Media provides clients with everything they need to create content and distribute it globally. Her studio offers space for sizzle reels, video production, podcasts, and event hosting. But what sets it apart is its streaming technology. The company distributes content to 14 platforms, including eight smart TVs (Vizio, LG, Samsung, Sony), reaching over 250 million households worldwide. Clients can monetize their content through CGM’s partnerships with major streaming services and music distribution platforms.
As clients flooded in, Reed observed something troubling. Productions would fly in all their equipment and crew from out of state, bypassing local camera houses, prop vendors, and lighting companies entirely. No economic development. No job creation.
She took her observations to then-Mayor Sylvester Turner. What she learned exposed Houston’s entertainment crisis: higher education institutions teaching theory without practical application, no central organization connecting productions with locations, and virtually nonexistent crews and distribution channels for independent films. Thousands of Houston creatives were doing gig work in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York, then returning home because of family and better cost of living.
Turner asked Reed to bring the community together. The IEP now connects professionals across Houston’s nine entertainment sectors: TV, film, art, theater, e-sports, gaming, music, fashion, and photography. Its annual soiree brings together hundreds of creatives who previously operated in silos.
Balancing corporate America with a growing media empire tested Reed daily. The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out 60% of small businesses nationwide. CGM survived through grants and being designated an essential worker.
“It was just by grace that we didn’t close,” Reed says. “As a business owner, the hardest thing for me is when I have to let someone go who does not see the vision. Everyone doesn’t get to stay in the boat.”
The unexpected turn
Reed’s biggest revelation came from an unexpected client: the government. Not as a contractor, but as a storyteller needing streaming infrastructure. There are approximately 5,000 public education and government channels designed to provide transparent information to citizens, and Reed’s company, with six years of streaming experience, had solutions most firms couldn’t touch.
“I thought streaming was gonna just be for film and TV, looking at it honestly as a consumer,” she reflects. “Then I realized there’s a total difference in what it looks like to manage and distribute content globally.” Now CGM serves city governments, generating billions in revenue, building monetization strategies and distribution channels they didn’t know they needed.
Texas secured $1.5 billion in entertainment incentives for 2025. Senate Bill 22 proposes allocating that amount in taxpayer funds over six years to promote Texas as a hub for film, television, and video game production. But Austin and Dallas typically capture the lion’s share of those dollars.
“What I would like to see is that the city of Houston starts to get a very healthy share of those incentives. You have to have projects that actually ask for the dollars, and those projects need to be filmed in Houston, putting Houston residents on those projects.”
– Centrell Reed
Warren Winston, managing director of Winston Worldwide LLC, has watched Reed transform Houston’s entertainment landscape since they met in July 2017. He’s seen the impact firsthand.
“The reality was the industry as a whole was operating in silos,” Winston explains. “Everybody was in their own little silo. What this whole process is now, it’s more of a collaborative effort versus a silo.”
Winston believes Houston has a geographic advantage that no other city can match.
“You can literally be in Houston and have all environments available, country setting, urban setting, city setting, beachfront setting, without having to bounce from place to place,” he says. “But the one thing that’s gonna be key is making sure we have the tax incentives that could be provided to those in the industry.”
