FAST Festival Recap

The crucial need for partnerships and the importance of curation, data, new revenue models and tackling the discovery conundrum were recurring themes at last week’s third annual FAST Festival, a virtual summit exploring the challenges and opportunities in the free ad-supported ecosystem across the globe.

Missed any of the sessions? Catch up on-demand here.

We kicked things off with an opening keynote from Olivier Jollet, who heads up international at Paramount’s global AVOD platform, Pluto TV. Pluto TV launched in the U.S. 11 years ago as an early pioneer in the FAST space and has scaled its presence to some 35-plus territories across four continents, delivering 700,000 hours of content. Paramount’s acquisition of the platform in 2019 “was a game changer,” Jollet said. “We were able to benefit from a global footprint, amazing content, iconic franchises, brands and IPs. That’s been facilitating the international rollout.”

While the backing of a global media company has been transformative, having a local approach in each of its key markets has been paramount. “Whether it’s content, advertising or distribution, it is key to scale a business to have the right partners on your side. We now have more than 400 partners that trust us [with their content] on the platform. We belong to Paramount and have access to this incredible content, but we remain a third-party aggregator platform. We don’t have a lot of partners that have left us—that’s a good sign as well.”

Rakuten TV, similarly, has been emphasizing a country-by-country approach in Europe as it looks to scale its presence in key markets. Now available across 43 countries, the level of localization varies by market, according to Marcos Milanez, chief content officer.

“It’s been an ongoing process of expanding that level of quality and localization,” Milanez said. “Particularly in the key Western European and Nordic markets, it comes down to strengthening that relationship with broadcasters, with local rights holders, making sure that we either acquire third-party channels from them or syndicate content from these companies, which we can then feed into our O&O channels. We’re trying to balance that content acquisition strategy of having a healthy mix of these existing third-party FAST channels but also launching our own-and-operated channels, both on the Rakuten TV platform but also on third-party FAST platforms.”

Localization was also a key theme of our keynote conversation with James Ross, CEO of Lightning International, which has curated a portfolio of broadcast-quality FAST channels that it is expanding across Europe and the Asia Pacific.

“If the content is in English, it frankly will only appeal in English-speaking markets,” Ross said. “We are doing a lot of work with AI live subtitling to make sure that all of our channels that are in non-English-speaking markets have burnt-in subtitles all the time. That’s driving the business at the moment. We have a lot of launches coming up with the channels being localized into European languages.”

Day two of the festival focused on IP owners and how they are approaching the FAST segment. We kicked things off with a deep dive into All3Media International’s direct-to-consumer approach with Gary Woolf, executive VP of strategic development, and Amanda Stevens, senior VP of global digital partnerships.

“Operating these genre channels allows us to build a FAST home for shows that are specific to our library,” Woolf said. “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 an aggregator, we license it for a reasonably long period of time. So, it just gives us that flexibility, which always drives more revenue for filmmakers.”

All3Media International’s D2C business encompasses much more than FAST channels, Stevens explained. “We’re expanding [FAST] 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.”

BBC Studios is also taking a multi-pronged direct-to-consumer approach, Kasia Jablonska, director of digital and on-demand for EMEA, told delegates in her session on how that content powerhouse is finding new opportunities to monetize its library. The suite of services Jablonska oversees includes FAST channels and BBC-branded SVOD services. These B2B2C propositions sit on the affiliate platforms as add-on services and include a service in Germany with Amazon and a soon-to-launch platform in Spain.

“The mandate is to follow the audience wherever they are. Is it CTV platforms? Is it OTT platforms? We’re very much moving in that free space, which FAST is a part of.”

The slate covers seven brands across 42 countries in EMEA, with 18 channels live in the U.S. “We take a unique position looking at the underlying advertising opportunities rather than just a pure content partnership on a rev-share basis.”

Scale and digital expertise were key considerations for the merger of Shout! Studios and FilmRise into Radial Entertainment, its CEO, Garson Foos, discussed in his keynote session.

“FilmRise is the leader in the FAST and performance-based business in the U.S. and growing considerably internationally as well,” Foos said. “Shout! has a good business in those categories, but we also have a strong content licensing business out to broadcasters and SVOD and a good transactional business and still have a good physical business, which was the legacy of the company. Now, we can have all the bases covered with this combination in the biggest and best way.”

With the combined library, the company will also be leveraging its access to data and analytics to “inform our content valuation going forward,” Foos said. “So, now, when we’re evaluating new deals, we’re going to have that much more data to inform our projections. We feel like it’s going to increase our accuracy as far as estimating what performance will be and in targeting content to the platforms.”

Understanding data has been central to pocket.watch’s success, with the company using its deep well of YouTube analytics to optimize the performance of creator economy content in the wider media ecosystem. Adding to its YouTube intel, the company now has analytics from the performance of its two FAST channels: Ryan and Friends and pocket.watch Game-On.

“Pocket.watch wants to be everywhere kids are,” said Albie Hecht, pocket.watch’s chief content officer, on what drove the FAST expansion. “From a real estate perspective, we jumped in prospecting very early. It has proven to be a tremendous driver for us in terms of the awareness it has given us in the larger space, especially as connected TVs come into play, the data we receive from it and the connection with parents. In FAST, we reach parents as well as kids because of the linear and co-viewing nature of it.”

The channels are curated from pocket.watch’s extensive YouTube footprint. “We have 59 creators, 1.3 billion subscribers, 10 billion views a month, 30,000 hours of programming. That is our base to build these channels. We have creator originals and mishmashes, which are half-hour television shows that are curated from this vast library of YouTube content. They’re curated in a way that’s themed and has original content added to it so it feels and looks like a television show, which is perfect for linear. It’s also parent-friendly because it’s curated in a way that meets what we considered in the old days, broadcast standards. Ryan and Friends is all about deep Ryan content and friends that are adjacent to that, like Diana and Toys and Colors. The pocket.watch channel, now called Game-On, is focused on gamers and Roblox content.”

Curation was the major theme of our final day of the FAST Festival, beginning with a session with Chris Sharp, a veteran of the pay-TV business who now serves as co-CEO of Video Solutions, the parent company of independent AVOD operator wedotv.

Beginning in German-speaking Europe and the U.K., the company now has a presence across Europe and has expanded its channels to LatAm and Asia, with an impending rollout in the Middle East.

“There’s a demand for our style of curation,” Sharp said. “We never wanted to approach it from a playlist point of view. Historically, you had one feed that went across lots of countries. Now you’ve got multiple devices, multiple affiliates, but you still have to deliver that quality service to them, and that’s one of the bigger challenges.”

When it comes to content licensing, wedotv has assembled a stable of consistent partners as it continues to build its slate, frequently buying across multiple countries and looking to deliver mass audience reach.

“This business is driven by advertising, so the more you [have titles] you know you can promote, you know you can get your affiliates to promote, then certainly audiences will come. We program like a traditional TV broadcaster.”

Brian Volk-Weiss, CEO of The Nacelle Company, shared with FAST Festival viewers how his indie has developed a multiplatform ecosystem for its content, including rolling out the popular Comedy Dynamics FAST channel curated from its library of stand-up performances.

On the approach to curation, Volk-Weiss said, “We don’t tell the audience what should make them laugh. We look at the data, and then we do two things. One, we see what they like. We get data every day, every week, every month, every quarter, depending on the partner. We just go with who’s doing great. It’s that simple. That’s about 67 percent of the curation. The other piece is that we hope that we have earned the audience’s trust. If they trusted us on the other stuff, then they will trust us on somebody they’ve never heard about. So, we give them what they want, and that’s a huge percentage of it, but then we also give them stuff we think they might like to try and get them as new fans of that content.”

Skilled curation helped power an 88 percent increase in viewing at Canela Media’s FAST channels, Karsten Amlie, senior VP of content distribution and general counsel, said in our session on the U.S. Hispanic opportunity. Addressing the discoverability challenge in general, Amlie discussed how the platform restructured its content rails in menus that “prioritize our high-performing and time-sensitive titles, but then on the other side, we’re also getting favorites that have been there forever and classic content. So, still [providing] that lean-back-and-enjoy experience, but then also more engaging content that maybe they wouldn’t have sampled before.”