The FAST market continues to evolve at a rapid pace.
The streaming format has seen several innovations on the traditional linear viewing experience, from pop-up channels designed around a holiday or movie premiere to channels dedicated to a single show to originals on FAST. It’s a far cry from Variety Intelligence Platform’s first FAST report, when the medium was still dominated by channels cobbled together by digital content created for YouTube by media brands.
To get a picture of what viewers and the industry can expect, VIP+ held a conversation on LinkedIn Live with luminaries from the FAST business: Bethany Atchison, VP of distribution partnerships at Vevo; Dean Devlin, CEO of Electric Entertainment; Geoff Clark, CEO of acTVe FAST Channels; and Ian Oliver, meteorologist at Fox Weather. The panel gave insightful views on where the category is heading, highlights of which are featured in this recap.
Celebrities in FAST: The experts discussed the overall rise of branding in FAST, from channel names adding TV or film studio branding to how single-IP channels are a form of branding to lighting on the next big branding trend in FAST — celebrity channels (à la the “Conan O’Brien TV” channel on Samsung TV Plus).
Clark spoke on this emerging trend, noting that “acTVe TV, when it pitches to agents and celebrities, positions FAST as the new-age tequila brand. Ten years ago, if you’re the Rock, you started a tequila brand, and everyone’s done that now. I think people are very wise to the fact that television is the ultimate marketing platform, and if you’re someone like Ryan Reynolds [who recently launched the “Maximum Effort” FAST channel], it makes a ton of sense. You own, or own pieces of, several large companies you can feed into your FAST channel through sponsorships or ads. If you’re a celebrity who is business savvy and has a bunch of content that’s safe enough for advertisers, FAST is a great destination.”
FAST & TV Merging: Atchison spoke to how the typical consumer doesn’t really differentiate between linear mediums, stating that consumers “don’t do the same breakouts that we do. They don’t obsess over acronyms the way we in the industry do. They just really say, ‘I want to watch TV, I want to watch my show, I want to watch my music video,’ and they want to watch it wherever they’re watching now. Vevo has a distribution strategy to have our content available wherever consumers are.”
Devlin echoed her point, adding, “For a consumer, it’s just watching television, but from a business standpoint, there’s a huge difference between television and FAST. In television, you’re in competition with other networks because it is a mature industry. In FAST, all boats rise when someone is successful. The more people who are watching FAST, the better we will all do in the long run.”
Genre Curation: Oliver noted how FAST channels curated by genre perform well, as seen in Fox Weather: “There are so many people that, just in a casual way, are passionate about weather. [Fox Weather] is a place where you’re going to find people that also love weather in the same sense as surfing content or other niche channels. What we found is there is a degree of convenience — people want to watch stuff when they want and where they want. In our example, we’ve just worked in putting Fox Weather everywhere. As long as you make it easy enough [to access] and you tap into a niche that enough people are passionate about, there’s no reason why [genre-curated] channels can’t have success.”
Beyond the above topics, the panel expounded on what we can expect from FAST with regards to single-IP channels, branding, originals, channel exclusivity and the evolution of pop-up channels. If you’re interested in what to expect from FAST in the coming years, be sure to watch.
