FAST Festival Keynote: Lightning International’s James Ross

James Ross, the CEO of Lightning International, discussed the company’s traction with its genre-based FAST channels, which include services for music, movies, documentaries and news.

Watch Ross’s FAST Festival keynote conversation with World Screen’s Kristin Brzoznowski here.

Ross noted how his FAST channel business has evolved in the last year since keynoting the inaugural FAST Festival in 2023: “Our business since then has doubled. FAST growth around the world has led to hugely improved revenues despite some ups and downs in the advertising world over the last year or so. We’re pleased with the growth of the number of channels we’re placing on platforms, and the number of platforms we’re dealing with is three or four times the number last year.”

Lightning is targeting global markets with its bouquet of genre-based FAST channels, appealing to a cross-section of platforms. “We have been concentrating previously on channels in English, but now we’re focusing on how to produce good FAST channels for local markets around the world, whether it’s subtitled programming or potentially dubbed. We’re coming up with some increasingly good models to make that work. That’s key to the future of the business, not just for Lightning but also for the overall content business and the FAST business. It has to adapt and work with local audiences’ requirements, be they cultural or language-based.”

Ross is a veteran of the media business across AsiaPac, and Hong Kong-based Lightning is looking to tap into the evolving FAST landscape in the region. “A broad part of our revenue is still coming from Europe and North America, but increasingly, we’re seeing good revenues starting in parts of the Asia Pacific now. Australia and New Zealand have been bright spots for some while. They continue to offer reasonably good revenues from channel consumption. We’re seeing places like India develop very well in terms of audience, with many people watching FAST channels. The challenge for India is that the CPMs are very low at the moment, which means that the danger is that your costs can be more than your revenues. We’ve also launched channels on other FAST platforms across Asia. It’s still early days in Southeast Asia. We’re starting to see audiences watch the channels, but the revenues are not there yet. There’s a lot more that’s got to be done in terms of getting the audience to understand the opportunity and making sure that those operators of FAST channels are marketing them in a way that attracts audiences and gets advertisers to understand what it’s all about. I think 2024 into 2025 in Southeast Asia, and broadly across Asia, will see a period of good growth in FAST.”

Ross is also bullish about continued opportunities in Europe and elsewhere. “We’ve had a lot of channel launches in Europe and around the world in the last 12 months. The platforms continue to grow. We look very carefully at the platforms that are successful and have the most chances of growing. We pick and choose very carefully which platforms we put our channels on. That is important because you can waste a lot of time and money putting channels on platforms that aren’t going to deliver anything back.”

On aligning with platform partners, Ross noted: “We look very carefully at what works well on individual platforms. We have a bouquet of channels that includes documentaries, news, music, entertainment and movies. We look at what our audience is watching on those platforms. Our music channels—of which we’ve got the Universal Music channels NOW 70s, NOW 80s, NOW Rock and NOW 90s—work well on platforms where music has captured people’s imagination. Music is interesting because it is one of those genres that people switch on and leave on. In the FAST world, we want stickiness; we want people to watch our channels, keep watching them and leave them on in the background. Then the ads get served, and we make revenue.”

News is another niche that is working well for Lightning with services such as GB News and NewsWorld. In entertainment, it is seeing traction with the movie channels Hollywood Classic Movies and RCM and the factual services Docsville, Pet Club TV and Globetrotter.

“It is a case of looking at the platform and what works for that platform, how that works with the channels we have and which brands would best resonate in that territory.”

The session wrapped with Ross weighing in on the role FAST can play in solving streaming’s discoverability challenge. “The lean-back experience is one of the great positives of FAST. It lets the programming, to some extent, discover itself. It is so important for audiences to find what they want to watch. Narrowing the choice, to some extent, is required because people’s minds get blown if there’s too much content thrown at them and they’re scrolling through rails of individual videos or channels. When something’s successful, there is a tendency to jump on the bandwagon and push it as far as you can. We don’t want to kill the golden goose—we are in danger of doing that if we confuse audiences with too much content. We all have to work harder to deliver consistently good quality, entertaining, gripping content that audiences want.”