James Ross on Lightning’s FAST Channel Approach

James Ross, CEO of Lightning International, joined the FAST Festival to discuss the company’s curated slate of broadcast-quality channels intended for broad audience reach, the importance of localization and emerging opportunities in the Asia Pacific.

Lightning International has assembled a slate of about 20 FAST channels, tapping into its long heritage of programming pay-TV services and serving as a content distributor, Ross said at the FAST Festival in a keynote session you can watch here.

“Our business has always been about how we get the content that we’re working with, whether we produce or represent, onto multiple different platforms,” Ross said. “We tend to make sure we have all rights. We need to maximize those rights. A move to FAST was a natural one. We observed very early on, going back five or six years, the beginnings of FAST, particularly with the smart-TV providers. We’re very familiar with producing broadcast channels. We do a lot of the tech in-house ourselves. So, that makes it very cost-effective for us to produce new streams of content as channels. We felt we could produce light versions of the pay channels that we were already producing, but at broadcast-quality standards. FAST is not about just getting a bunch of tapes and playing them back to back. It has to look like a TV channel. Particularly now, consumers are expecting that any channel they see on their TV looks like the high-quality standards they would expect from a terrestrial channel.”

Movies, music and factual have been core themes in curating the slate. “All the platforms pretty much, possibly with the exception of one or two of the Indian platforms, have a restricted number of channels that they are taking. It’s very difficult to market hundreds and hundreds of channels. So, it’s very important that all channels in the FAST channel space, but also in the pay-TV space, have great brands and people recognize what they’re for. Our focus has been on brand: the program brand, the channel brand, the genre brand. As an independent distributor of channels, we need to cut through and produce stuff that can grab people’s attention. The platforms all want to sell lots of advertising. And if they want to sell lots of advertising, that means the channels need to appeal to many people. While it is good to have a niche appeal in certain circumstances, it is also quite difficult to make the advertisers and the agencies excited if you’ve only got a very small portion of the audience. So, definitely, we’re seeing a move away from niche channels at the big platforms. They have to be mass-market channels.”

Lightning has already seen strong traction for its FAST channels in Europe and is looking to boost that with localization efforts.

“If the content is in English, it frankly will only appeal in English-speaking markets. 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.”

Lightning is also subtitling its channels in Asia, where opportunities for FAST expansion are beginning to emerge as smart-TV manufacturers expand their content slates and broadcasters build their own streaming platforms.

“We’ve been working with broadcasters to see how we can add extra tiers of channels on a FAST basis to their existing platforms,” Ross explained, referencing deals with Mediacorp in Singapore and TVB in Hong Kong.

Lightning is also aligning with pay-TV platforms that are boosting their FAST slates, among them Fetch TV and Foxtel in Australia.

The conversation then moved to revenue models, with Lightning taking a flexible approach to its platform partners. “If they want to do the sales, then generally we’ll do it on a revenue-share basis. We’re also open to doing inventory share or a combination of the above. We’re in the process of putting together a consortium of folks who will sell the ads where it’s appropriate to do that. So, if the platform doesn’t want to do it, then we can. There are some opportunities for backfill, where platforms have available inventory and want us to sell it. And that does seem to be an opportunity as well. We’re looking into that. For now, the majority is revenue share from the platforms, but we expect the inventory share and the slots that we control to be growing in the future. We’re going to be much more focused on that.”

On tackling discoverability, Ross highlighted the importance of metadata. “That means supplying more than just a simple photograph and the name of a show. We have to go much deeper with the descriptions of what’s in each episode. Who are the stars? What is the content about? We have to have a variety of different photographs for every episode. A lot more information has to be provided. If you don’t have that information, you can’t build the marketing that you need to do that. But it does come down to the relationship that you build with the platforms. We work very closely with them to make sure that they’re promoting our stuff as much as possible. There’s still a big human touch in getting stuff promoted on different platforms. We have to be able to move quickly to provide the assets that enable them to promote it. That is one of the things that AI can potentially help with. We also need to make sure that the advertisers know what the content is. One of the things I’ve been looking at is understanding how AI can watch the programming and understand what’s in every scene of every show and then convert that into some kind of advertising offer.”

While expanding the slate is a priority, Ross said that Lightning is selective about the platforms it works with. “Some of the smaller players out there that have launched on apps as FAST have struggled to get any kind of meaningful audience. For us to deliver channels and go through all the tech and requirements, it can be quite challenging. We have a filtration process where we look at the size of the platform. We also look at the size of the country that it’s in, the state of development, how much they’re likely to spend and what the CPMs are.”