FAST Fest Spotlights Independent Platforms

Plex’s Scott Olechowski, wedotv’s Philipp Rotermund and Free TV Networks’ Thanasis Tsiris weighed in on working with IP owners to build out their AVOD and FAST channel lineups as the FAST Festival continued today.

The Platform Perspective session, moderated by World Screen’s Kristin Brzoznowski and featuring Olechowski, co-founder and chief product officer at Plex; Tsiris, senior VP of distribution and partnerships at Free TV Networks; and Rotermund, CEO and co-founder at wedotv, can be viewed here.

Plex has been in AVOD since 2019 and FAST since 2020, Olechowski noted. “We’re an aggregator. Being independent, we’re able to work with just about anybody to deliver a wide variety of content all over the world,” he said of the company’s competitive edge. “We’ve focused quite a bit in the past year on bringing social signals into the mix. We have a product called Discover Together, and the idea is that you can, with your close friends and family, follow what they’re watching and see what they’re rating things. It takes that piece of how we find and discover content in the real world and connects it to the entertainment experience.”

“We are in the business of saving people money,” Tsiris quipped. “We do that by providing a lot of free entertainment, which is professionally curated and high quality, and we’re working with major studio partners to get that done. Free is the absolute focus of the business now. We have OTA digi-nets, FAST channels—with some overlap in programming with those digi-nets, so we can cross-promote them—as well as a direct-to-consumer platform that will be launching.”

It’s a similar story for wedotv, Rotermund said. “We are a free and legal place to find good-quality, curated content. When we started back in 2018, it was tough to find content. But since free has evolved, AVOD has evolved and everyone is talking about FAST, content owners are opening up and getting more flexible on different business models. We’re a general entertainment service. You will find everything from movies, series, documentaries, live sports and a wide range of FAST channels.”

On the approach to curation, Tsiris noted: “We think about combining major tentpoles where they’re available. We have some partnerships with major studios, who are invested in our company and helping to provide those, and then supporting those major drivers that are likely to service customer acquisition and supporting those with what we call a hidden gem selection of titles that maybe are not being exploited in FAST or AVOD currently.”

“It is driven by what’s available,” Olechowski agreed. “We’re unlikely to do a lot of exclusives. It tends to cost quite a bit and not necessarily deliver the returns you would need to see. It’s exciting to see what’s becoming available. We will almost always have some tentpole stuff that’ll bring folks in, and then we look at that halo—if you come in for X, can we get you to Y and Z? Often, we’ll go very deep in a genre so that people can get satisfied and go down that rabbit hole.”

Rotermund referenced the increased availability of content to AVOD and FAST channel operators. “I remember the first time at one of the MIPTVs, I came to a stand and said I wanted to acquire AVOD content. And they said to me, A-what? The opportunities seem almost to be endless at the moment. There are great catalogs out there, and the big, pay SVOD streamers are creating all this great content themselves or have its from their mother houses from their big and deep libraries.”

Drilling further into acquisition strategies and how they are informed by data, Olechowski said, “We have a pretty large AVOD catalog and hundreds of FAST channels. We can let the data guide us and see what people are finding naturally and what they’re enjoying. We’re looking at minutes watched and completion rates. In many ways, that’s the guiding factor. But we sometimes make conscious decisions to develop an audience for a certain genre. We dove in deeper on more sports content this year.”

Rotermund noted how his team’s strategy has evolved: “The beginning was first come, first serve, see whatever you can grab. Once you have a big variety, you can go deep and have the data to guide you. We also have acquisitions teams and programming planning teams. They’ve done free TV all their lives.”

Tsiris also stressed the importance of a “human touch” in guiding content decisions. “Of course, the data is great, and that’s an edge that, especially in this era, gives us a much more granular view. But bringing human curation adds another element to it. If you think about algorithmic recommendations, they’re often repetitive. If you can bring in somebody who has been doing this for a long time and knows this is an underserved audience, we can find some engaging content that’s available and identify that gap; that’s where you start seeing some over-indexing on your return on your investment.”

Olechowski agreed, adding: “It is that combination of art, science, machine and people working together to make this happen.”

Addressing the issue of too much choice, Rotermund noted, “It is all about curation. Whether you have 30,000 hours, 100,000 hours or 10 million hours doesn’t matter. You have to give the user a guideline. This is also why FAST or linear TV has had such a renaissance all of a sudden. People have still been speaking about ‘Netflix fatigue’; I think that is still a big issue. Curation is the key, and that’s where the human factor comes in. You can have all the data, but you have to make the content accessible for the user.”

Olechowski added, “That whole concept of discovery is core to what we’re doing. It’s one of the reasons we are doing Discover Together with the social piece. Having a ton of content is not a problem, but we need the tools, curation and means to make it personalized to that user. Having more gives you a bigger canvas to play with. But ultimately, you still need to paint a nice picture. You can’t just expect people to find this on their own. When you start getting into these deeper, longer-tail catalogs, the quality of the metadata is very different. Just getting a baseline so the recommendation systems can surface stuff is a big part of the problem we need to solve. The size is not the question. It’s more [about] these tools and how you make it discoverable.”

Tsiris agreed, noting: “This is a very big generalization, but about 80 percent of the revenue has been driven off of 20 percent of the content. On the flip side, you’ve got 80 percent of your content fighting for that bottom 20 percent of the revenue. If you get to a point where you start seeing some diminishing returns on that long-tail content, that presents a problem. Curation and new product features go a long way in solving that, but it’s how you present and get it to the customers.”

On the features Plex uses to enhance the discoverability piece, Olechowski said, “It’s about getting as many signals as possible. The richer the signals, the more you can do. It’s never going to be one algorithm that solves this for everybody all the time. You do have to attack this in different ways. We’ve been experimenting more with mood-based recommendations. We have human curation as well. I’m able to look at social signals and see what people are recommending to their friends and what they’re watch listing. A lot of that is driven by what’s on the home screen. That’s where so much of the viewing is coming from. So, how do you put together the right home screen for each user? We’re starting to lean into dayparting and looking at the type of device you’re coming in on. That is also going a long way to help us maximize the home-screen real estate.”

Tsiris added: “We think about how we’re cross-promoting our digi-nets and our FAST channels. Where they have complementary content offerings but semi-different experiences depending on where and how you’re watching it, we can drive viewers from one to the other. If it’s a Friday night action movie block that we’re programming on one of our digi-nets, we can also run our customers to our FAST channels. We try to think about all those levers we have to pull.”

Minutes watched is the most important metric, Olechowski said of using data analytics, alongside completion rates and search histories. “What are people looking for? Once they get there, are they satisfied, or are they diving into a genre based on that? We’re looking at everything from search to what they are actually watching and then how much they are watching. We share as much as we can with the partners. We have a portal for our partners to log into.”

On the approach to content licensing and partnerships ahead, Tsiris has seen a slight move away from rev-share toward flat-fee licensing. “I think that will probably continue to be the case as the space matures and ad revenue catches up to engagement. Beyond that, I think there’s an interesting trend where people are working with digital-first creators to bring their content to FAST. Licensing big tentpole theatrically released movies from studios is great, but you have to find the edge cases where you can get a lot of return without spending a lot of money.”

Rotermund has seen a similar move toward more traditional licensing deals in the AVOD and FAST spaces. “Most of our deals these days are paying a flat fee for a certain license period,” he said. He also sees the potential to expand the reach of digital-first creator content.

Olechowski added, “Because we’re aggregating across so many different types of partners, we’re doing inventory-share, rev-share and license deals. Being able to support a variety of different models has been good for our business and our partners. We’re starting to see enough users and monetization in the space, where many of the guarantees we used to have to do are not as important. The costs are coming down a little bit for us, and all the boats are rising.”

On what’s ahead, Rotermund sees room for more AVOD originals as the market matures. “We’ve traditionally been buying library content. As more big TV budgets shift in our direction, we’ll be able to afford originals.”

AI could be beneficial to the discoverability problem, Tsiris said. “FAST discoverability is a big challenge. Products differ across all smart TVs and different services. Channels are often placed in different numbers in different verticals. Depending on the platform, there may not even be a search functionality. Sometimes, that metadata is not well-formed with older, free back catalog content. So, it is a challenge to get all of that to the space where it could even be indexed and searchable. But if AI can provide a solution that makes that much more personalized and easier for customers, and you cut down on that endless scrolling, that’s huge. Scrolling through 400 FAST channels hoping you find something is very difficult.”

Olechowski agreed, adding, “One of the big things we’re doing on the FAST side is understanding the EPG, mapping it to what we call our mediaverse. Making that content discoverable has driven a lot of viewing. We found a third-party partner and ran our entire AVOD collection through their engine, giving us a baseline of common metadata across our catalog. Now, the recommendation engine can use that. There’s no doubt in my mind that AI will help us with personalization.”