All3Media International’s FAST Track

All3Media International’s Gary Woolf, executive VP of strategic development, and Amanda Stevens, senior VP of global digital partnerships, kicked off day two of the FAST Festival with a session on the distributor’s digital strategy.

All3Media International has rolled out a portfolio of FAST channels alongside an array of other digital services. You can watch the session with Woolf and Stevens, moderated by World Screen’s Mansha Daswani, here.

The company began looking at the FAST space in 2019, Woolf said, with So Real… landing on U.S. FAST platforms in June 2020 was a way to drive extra revenue from the company’s broad slate, which stands at more than 35,000 hours. “Having our own FAST services, rather than just focusing on licensing content to third parties, allows us to manage our content, how it’s presented and when it’s presented. We can build new opportunities specific to the curation of our library.”

The slate runs across single IP services like Midsomer Murders—which streams over 1 billion minutes every quarter, Woolf said—as well as brands built around well-known personalities, such Monty Don. There are also genre-specific digital brands like Demand Drama, which has launched in the U.K. and is headed to Australia.

“Operating these genre channels allows us to build a FAST home for shows that are specific to our library. It allows us to create opportunities for shows in our library that don’t have enough hours for a single-IP channel but are still amazing viewing. As those channels grow, we can also seed them to build them into single IPs over time. And it gives us flexibility on when we launch content. When we have short windows between licenses, we can put that on our channels. When we license to a third-party channel or we license to an aggregator; we license it for a fairly reasonably long period of time. So, it just gives us that flexibility, which always drives more revenue for filmmakers.”

Stevens leads the digital publishing team at the company, covering EST, SVOD, AVOD and FAST. On the FAST front, the slate has been targeted to English-language markets as well as territories like the Netherlands and Nordics, with about 60 percent of the channels being single IP brands.

“We’re lucky we have long-running brands that are still in production, which lend themselves well to FAST exploitation.”

Building the AVOD footprint beyond FAST has been a key priority this year, Stevens said. “We’re expanding those channel brands to become more digital brands in the YouTube space. If you have a mixed-IP genre-based brand, it’s not going to be as immediately familiar to the audience in that territory as a show that’s been out on BBC or one of the bigger TV channels. That is a way of building those channel brands.”

The company has also been expanding its suite of subscription services, Stevens said, “publishing our wider library on platforms like Amazon PVD [Prime Video Direct], but also SVOD ‘channels’ if you like.” The FAST channel Inside Outside, for example, started life as an SVOD channel on Roku and Prime Video. “We are working to roll that out further this year.”

Addressing the pressure points in FAST currently, Woolf referenced the sheer volume of channels available on services. “We’re seeing that competition come from the big U.S. studios. They don’t come in with just one or two channels—they’re coming in with 10, 20, 30 channels. On the other end of this, you have the [digital] creators; they are now also bringing their audiences to FAST.”

Woolf also referenced the “checkerboard of which FAST channels are available on which device in the market. That can’t be conducive to the advertising space and proper media planning beyond programmatic. It’s getting that balance of trying to have your channels ubiquitous where it makes sense. Some of the smaller platforms, you could lose money; certainly, if it’s a headend connection, your costs are fixed regardless of how many people watch it. The challenge for us is that balancing act.”

Monetization is also a challenge, Stevens said. ”Margins can be quite tight on FAST channels. We have traditionally worked on a revenue-share basis with all of our platforms, so they represent 100 percent of inventory and revenue share back to us. We’ve started to work with Little Dot, our sister company, to try to sell any unsold inventory. We are open to experimenting a bit. Recently, we reduced the ad load on some of our channels from 10 or 12 minutes down to 6 minutes. The idea being that if you have less ad time but better fill, that might increase viewership.”

The conversation then moved to programming single IP versus multi-brand services. On what makes for a good single IP service, volume matters, but there are plenty of other considerations, Stevens said.

“What makes for a good FAST channel, whether it’s single or mixed IP, is that it has to feel familiar to the viewer or be packaged in such a way that it feels familiar.”

Stevens referenced the curation strategy for Demand Drama, noting, “It’s better to have fewer brands in the schedule at any one time, but chunky blocks of schedule and similar types of content at the same time every day. The messaging is also easily communicated and easily understood. Thriller Thursdays, Crime Sundays. The viewer can just jump in and know what they’re going to get.”

A scripted service in FAST can be a challenge, Woolf noted. “FAST is a casual view. Story arcs have moved on. The thing with Demand Drama is we will strip a show, but we want to signpost that on-screen, when the next episode is, so people can make that appointment to view.”

Providing an on-demand option is also helpful, Stevens said, “particularly if there is any kind of series arc.”

All3Media International is tackling the discovery challenge in several ways, Woolf said, including using YouTube.

“All of our genre-based channels now have YouTube channels as well. We’re also investigating looped linear feeds, almost mini FAST channels within those environments. We’re talking to some people about doing that in the Twitch space. We’d quite like to look at that further in the YouTube space. That builds some brand familiarity. Of course, there’s money to be made there. YouTube is such a huge platform. It’s in so many living rooms now. For our producers, it’s important that we’re driving that revenue. We’re here to make money for our producers. And you can build that brand familiarity. Having social channels beyond YouTube—Facebook, Instagram, all of that—means you can talk to the platforms to co-promote, co-post around those channels. There’s also an opportunity from these social spaces to promote other experiences outside of the FAST space. Amanda mentioned Inside Outside in SVOD. So, you can have people coming into that Inside Outside environment and you can upsell them in some way from the YouTube to the SVOD. So, it’s part promotion, part familiarity, part further monetization of content. And then we have regular meetings with the platforms.”

Woolf also referenced a key structural change made at All3Media International as it relates to digital activities. “Up until the end of last year, we ran all of these digital activities within All3Media International as a self-contained incubator business. Now we’ve plugged it into the main All3Media International machine, so we’re working much closer with marketing, which means that we have access to many more tools in terms of our social reach, and the content that we can give to platforms and support platforms with.”

Stevens highlighted the importance of stunts and “moments” in schedules, using recognizable talent, “and pitching for promotion on a platform, whether that’s banner promotion on the home screen or if there’s some kind of featured channel slot that’s available on the EPG. We have also experimented with giving rights to platforms for our shows for use on their O&O channels. We’re not looking to get revenue share on that exploitation, but we would hope that if someone watches a Gordon Ramsay show on a platform’s owned-and-operated FAST channel and there’s messaging saying go and watch this on So Real… that we’ll see the uptick there.”

On choosing which platforms to align with, Woolf said there are several factors to consider. “We want to understand the consumer journey: how you reach that service. I switch my TV on and then what? Is there an app that I need to download? How are you going to get me to download that app? Is it something that is automatically there on startup or on the remote control as a click-through? The ability for an audience to get to a service is really important. And how that’s messaged. [Having a] sensible marketing budget to do that out of the gate. If it’s a new device, where has it been shipped? With TVs, it’s very much about what models you’re available in, so what’s the backward compatibility? Those are the things we’d consider.”

The ability to monetize is also a key consideration, Stevens added. “Do you have your own sales team?”

For the year ahead, “building digital brands” is the priority, Woolf said. “We want to be awake to single IP opportunities, as content comes back to us after various windows. We’re tracking that, seeing what the next big single IP is. There are some great brands in the library. Sometimes, the frustration for us is that our sales team has done such a fantastic job that we can’t get our hands on things straight away! For us, it’s then taking these digital brands and finding as many ways as possible for them to manifest themselves. We’re looking increasingly at creating niche SVODs around parts of the library, using these digital brands. We talked about social presence. We’re bringing in that YouTube audience. We’ve got the FAST presence. There’s the potential to put this content out on models like Prime Video Direct. The more that the content within these digital brands is recognizable, the more [audiences will] say, I might want to subscribe to that service.”

The key, Woolf said, is not being dependent on any one revenue model. “Ad revenues fly some years, they fall through the floor some years. The subscription model, some years it’s great, some years it’s not. So it’s just having that mixed ecosystem of opportunities so that we’re constantly bringing revenue back.”

New opportunities are emerging with broadcasters, too, Woolf said, referencing the company’s recent traction in Australia, which included the launch of The Yorkshire Vet FAST channel with Seven Network’s 7plus streaming platform.

“What’s interesting about that model is that it can unlock live brands that are still on the traditional linear TV broadcast without impacting those main broadcast deals. It unlocks those rights so that everybody benefits. The broadcasters are benefiting from FAST. Of course, we’re getting that return that we can pay off to the producers. And in those situations, we’re agnostic in terms of who runs and schedules those channels, because it’s really important that we’re giving the broadcasters the comfort of having some control over which [seasons] they are airing compared to what they’re putting out on the main channels.”