Making FAST progress

There’s been a lot of buzz around FAST – free, ad-supported streaming television. But why has it become such a hot topic in recent times? For an innovation to really take off, it needs two things: the enabler – the technology platform that underpins it – and the demand from the target market. These came together in FAST.

The enabler is high-quality video streaming over ubiquitous broadband. Those with video to share could deliver it direct to consumers, and all the big producers, syndicators and aggregators were developing strategies around it.

Demand was triggered by the Covid pandemic, when consumers were forced to stay at home and watch television. Getting your content in front of consumers was suddenly a big opportunity, but there was a need to move quickly. A long list of back-burner or field-trial projects got quickly moved to the front of the line.

If you have a substantial catalogue of content, what is the fastest, cheapest way of making it available to all these people who are now desperate for entertainment? The answer is FAST.

FAST channels are as simple as a broadcast operation can be. There are no live events or interventions: they are pre-planned playlists with some simple branding graphics. They are ideal for cloud implementation, which means you can stand up multiple channels very quickly. If you already own the content, then you need very little capital investment: it is all OpEx, which you can tie to your income.

The nature of the channels is often very niche. On my Roku box at home in Colorado, there is a channel that is 24/7 reruns of The Carol Burnett Show. Another is wall-to-wall The Rockford Files. It may well be that there are hours in the day when the audience for these channels is zero, but they cost so little to run that provided there are some people to view the commercials at other times of the day, it is all worth it.

The key take-home message of FAST is that it proves there is still an incredible demand for free content. It also enables the consumer to try new programming. With SVOD, you are limited to what that service offers. With tough economic times, it’s also becoming difficult to justify the spend on subscriptions.

FAST is ad-supported, but by being direct to the consumer you cut out some of the middle men in the advertising chain. Startups can implement ad tech that relies heavily on automation to sell and place spots and integrates dynamic ad insertion in the common workflow.

That allows inventory to be sold in different ways. Big brands want affinity with the programmes – they want to be in NFL broadcasts or Chicago Med – and want to buy spots. Others are simply shopping for impressions. Ad buying and selling will begin to support rules around brand protection and placement to deliver the broadcast premium experience across FAST and AVOD services. The next generation of FAST and AVOD platforms will allow publishers to deliver the same quality of advertising and experience that brands and consumers are accustomed to on linear channels, while still providing digital-style targeted advertising.

This brings me to converged television (CTV). FAST is CTV and offers the best of both worlds: whether you want to micro-manage your campaign or hand it all over to automation, you want to be able to buy and sell through the same automated portal. The next big thing in CTV is CTV 2.0, a fusion of the quick-to-market content we saw with the initial launches of FAST and AVOD and the more profitable and sustainable advertising quality that is the hallmark of linear TV.

FAST offers a new business model: direct to consumer, direct to advertiser, with minimum intervention and maximum automation. It requires multiplatform selling tools and ad servers that can support DAI with broadcast-quality placement rules. But these too are now available as cloud services, wrapping it all up into a package that is, well, fast to implement.

Steve Reynolds is President at Imagine Communications