To maximise monetisation, operators and video service providers need to be strategic with the FAST channels they add to their portfolio and leverage enhanced discoverability tools. They need to cater to the specific preferences of end users to enhance viewer engagement while boosting their ad opportunities. This article will explore some of the key elements to successfully launching a FAST channel offering.

How to implement a user-driven FAST channels offering

The proliferation of FAST (Free Ad-Supported TV) channels is undeniable. However, merely presenting hundreds of these channels to users can lead to a paradox of choice. This often results in viewers feeling overwhelmed, potentially not watching any channels, or even worse, turning off the TV or watching something on another service. Therefore, it’s crucial for service providers to curate a FAST offering that aligns with audience preferences, bolstered by effective discoverability tools. Moreover, considerations around distribution, advertising, and content alignment are paramount when launching a FAST channel.

For a distinctive experience, leveraging the niche content typically found in FAST is essential. It’s logical to assume that a viewer who watched Formula 1 content via a Pay TV channel might be interested in a motorsport-themed FAST channel. Similarly, a fan of ‘MasterChef’ would likely gravitate towards cooking channels. By tapping into viewer preferences, service providers can craft a compelling value proposition, target a specific audience segment, and subsequently boost advertising revenues. After all, tailored content often commands higher cost per mille (CPM) rates.

Advertising plays a pivotal role in the FAST ecosystem. With the surge in FAST channels, there’s an expansion in content inventory. Both service providers and advertisers need a streamlined strategy to match ads with appropriate audience segments, ensuring expansive reach. Advertisers aim to engage the majority of their target audience, making this a critical factor in their investment decisions. Furthermore, the relevance of ads to the audience is essential. To truly maximise revenue, a solution that consolidates demand from various sources and offers a broad audience reach is vital. This approach can package available ad slots to achieve optimal monetisation. However, service providers must tread carefully to ensure their audience data isn’t exploited by digital advertising behemoths. In today’s age, where addressable advertising is mainstream, there are numerous TV-centric solutions tailored to addressing this concern for service providers.

Personalising the FAST channel experience

The media domain is in a state of flux, ushering in a heightened demand for top-tier, user-centric TV experiences. Generative AI for content discovery, and increasingly, content creation, appears to be the solution the industry is leaning towards. Such AI-driven recommendations empower service providers to suggest FAST channels that resonate with viewer inclinations.

Looking ahead, the vision is for AI-powered personalised FAST channels. These channels would offer a bespoke experience, where each viewer, upon tuning in, encounters content curated to their individual tastes. This evolution promises a future where content aligns seamlessly with each viewer’s unique preferences.

Conclusion

Research shows that Europeans engaged in 50% more FAST content hours in Q3 2022 than the same quarter the previous year. The rise in FAST channel consumption has resulted in an explosion of new channels. To stand out in today’s highly competitive FAST market, content providers must deliver a compelling, user-driven experience to viewers.

By adopting AI-driven content discovery, AI-based personalised FAST channels, and targeted TV advertising solutions, service providers can drive viewers to the content they want to watch, segment audience data, and offer targeted ads.

With FAST, content providers and aggregators have an opportunity to fuse the best of linear and digital – delivering bundled products that provide reach, interactivity and performance. However, they need a calculated strategy to avoid some of the complexities of FAST in order to reap the rewards of this exciting media format.

What’s so appealing about FAST

For publishers looking for a new outlet for their content that will provide net-new audiences, FAST is a big opportunity. Analyst firm Omdia foresees FAST channel revenues to reach $12 billion by 2027. However, the FAST market is not uniform. In the U.S., FAST has caught on much more quickly, where cable TV prices are very high and TV ad loads take up a large percentage of view time. Many people have embraced all forms of digital TV as an alternative to cable.

In Europe, viewers have been slower to drop linear TV, partly because it has taken more time for the market to offer enough content on FAST channels to give viewers the selection they want. This means that most TV ad spending is still on linear, but change is inevitable. Variety predicts that Western Europe will lose about 7 million more Pay TV subscribers by 2027.

FAST – a mix of linear and digital 

For advertisers, FAST offers many benefits. FAST delivers a combination of long-form content programming and in-stream commercials that is similar to linear TV. Viewers can choose from on-demand content and live-streaming, which can refer to actual live events like professional sports, or content that is streaming in real-time that’s the same as what is being broadcast on a linear channel at the same time.

Along with that comes a number of elements that will be familiar to linear advertisers. First is the reach – particularly in the U.S. today. Many viewers of FAST TV have “cut the cord” or are light linear TV viewers, so advertisers can get a valuable and big audience on the channel. Scheduling, dynamic ad insertion and programming all work similarly on FAST as on regular linear, often because the top channels are managed by traditional TV broadcasters. What’s more, advertisers can use third-party currencies, which is a major plus.

There are also a number of key digital elements to FAST that will remind advertisers of AVOD. It’s addressable, which allows advertisers to target audiences using first and third-party data. FAST is also interactive. Viewers can use their remote control to click on ads and even purchase products.

Get the most from FAST advertising 

For publishers to profit from FAST content, they must have a strategy in place that helps advertisers make the most of this exciting channel. That means FAST must be part of the cohesive whole of a publisher’s offering, not a separate channel off to the side. Additionally, advertisers need a clear understanding of the different audiences, content availability and ad experiences on FAST vs. other content so they don’t think of FAST as a one-for-one replacement for linear TV.

Publishers should also encourage advertisers to test the unique elements of FAST advertising including interactivity and targeting. When advertisers see that they can get more engagement from their key audiences they will be willing to pay higher CPMs for the inventory.

To make all of this work, it’s important to have insight and control across the entire product portfolio. With a unified product catalogue, publishers can provide advertisers with smarter proposals that help them reach audiences across channels with products that make the most sense for each impression.

Publishers with a centralised order management workflow can also ensure that they are optimising ad delivery across FAST and other channels, incorporating elements like universal frequency capping and yield maximization.

FAST offers advertisers an opportunity to reach a valuable audience with ads that combine the best of both linear and digital. Publishers must take advantage of this window with a strategy that makes the most of FAST so that it commands the right price and brings in demand. FAST is likely the “future of TV” so publishers set the tone for their future advertising business with the way they sell and deliver FAST today.

So it’s no wonder that publishers are turning to FAST as a solution to the need to keep revenues growing. But is FAST a long-term solution? It’s certainly the shiny new thing, but is it the best strategic play?

With FAST channels earning over $12bn globally by 2027, doubling today’s levels (Omdia data), it’s clear that there is gold in those mountains. As with AVOD, FAST channels inventory can be sold directly or programmatically.  But unlike AVOD, with FAST the media owner doesn’t bear the technology, stream delivery and marketing costs. On paper it is all upside if you own content that audiences crave.

But because FAST is offsite, it can struggle to reach the CPMs of more addressable forms of advertising – where first-party data is involved, for example.

The second challenge FAST faces is that of demographic. While audiences are growing in size, they tend to consist of older age groups. That’s fine in itself, but it does provide a limitation for brands looking to reach other demos, or extend reach beyond that older group.

Viewing behaviour also poses a challenge. Linear FAST channels are ideal for long streaming sessions – the TV equivalent of background music. This means they’re not likely to fare well on attention, and will quickly meet frequency caps.

Another question to ask is how the FAST channels will work alongside existing channels, and if there is a danger of audience cannibalisation.

Then come the technological limitations. Whilst third-party FAST vendors’ tech is admirable in how easy it makes the process, it means an extra partner and all the complications that come with that. For data-driven businesses it causes a lot of headaches. Often these third-parties are black boxes, with little in the way of actionable analytics.

With these considerations in place, let us revisit the first question – does FAST offer a revenue solution?

Naturally, the FAST format is designed to provide an easy access point for viewers. And simplicity is at the heart of the FAST proposition. Spinning up FAST channels is theoretically easy; most often they consist of just one IP, and of content that is already ready-to-go, likely sitting dormant. So, it’s a no-brainer way to make money from content that’s gathering dust.

Yet content owners might be just as well served spending their time and energy looking more closely at their existing channel and advertising set up. There are always efficiencies to be made on O&O channels which could make a significant impact on the bottom line.

Ad errors alone account for a huge hole in revenue. These can mostly be avoided, if you know what caused them. Dedicating resource to spotting, and fixing ad errors quickly, could be just as rewarding as standing up a new channel.

There’s also the ongoing job of cleaning the programmatic pipes, and supply/demand path optimisation to undertake. This can’t be done without clear sight of how the whole chain is performing – which again comes down to data. These close-to-home existing issues are easy to overlook, and tricky to dig down into. But they’re crucial when every penny counts.

Perhaps it’s worth considering whether to focus on the massive savings that could be made in the existing set-up rather than investing resources in a whole new set-up.

Where FAST channels are a part of a broader strategy, make sure that the emphasis is not just on establishing the channels. Once they’re live, they must be hawkishly watched, data must be scrutinised, opportunities to tweak ad campaigns, content delivery and QoE must be found.

FAST channels alone are not the answer to revenue woes. But an overall scrutiny of all streaming data, on Owned and Offsite properties, is.

FAST channels air content on a set schedule with regular ad breaks. If that sounds like traditional television viewing, there’s a reason for that. They are designed to take viewers back to the “set it and forget it” days of cable TV, keeping the channel on for as long as possible and soaking in the ad impressions.

Unlike cable TV, however, FAST channels are streamed over the Internet, and they’ve got serious muscle behind them — Fox, Paramount, Comcast, Dish Network, Amazon, and many other high-profile media companies all operate FAST channels. Several of the most popular, including Freevee, Tubi, and Pluto TV, also feature an advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD) component, where viewers can stream content they want to watch at any time with ad breaks.

Behind the scenes, FAST channels are also more complex to operate than cable TV. Content is pulled from different sources, the online stream is created, and the video player interacts in real-time with third-party ads and the technology that powers them. Several complex technical operations must perform perfectly for viewers to “set it and forget it.”

So, how does it all work? On FAST channels, ad breaks are not built directly into the content. Instead, they are dynamically inserted by SCTE 35 ad cues, which trigger “ad pods” within the content. The transition from content to ad is not always smooth. Sometimes ads play at a significantly different audio level or picture quality than the content. Other times, ads are replaced by a slate that might be completely static or count down to the content returning – picture the classic “we’ll be right back” message. Worst of all, dynamically inserted slates might appear as completely blank screens, leading the viewer to believe the stream has been disrupted. And that’s if the stream wasn’t already disrupted – plenty of FAST viewing sessions buffer, freeze, or crash when the ad pods are cued.

At Witbe, we conducted independent research that found as many as 30% of viewing sessions on some FAST channels encounter an issue with the ads shown. As these services rely on reaching a set number of ad impressions to sell ad slots to advertisers, that’s a major problem. Viewers who experience ad insertion issues are unlikely to stay on or return to the channel, so current and future ad impressions alike are lost. Similarly, advertisers who feel their ad impression numbers were not successfully met may withhold payment or avoid purchasing ads in the future.

So, what can FAST channel providers do to solve the problem? It begins with verification. Like all OTT streaming video, the only way to truly measure performance is by monitoring on the same apps, devices and networks that viewers at home are using. Monitoring ad performance on real devices is the only opportunity to truly observe the issues that actual viewers are experiencing, allowing providers to identify and improve them.

When monitoring ad performance on FAST channels, it’s important to measure certain criteria for all ads. For live and on-demand content, teams should monitor whether or not the ad plays, audio loudness, and video quality compared to the content, the total duration of the ad, the ratio of ads to slates in every ad pod, and if the slates feature any motion to keep viewers active, among other factors.

Recording ad performance is also helpful for verifying with advertisers, who often request proof that their ads were correctly delivered before continuing support. To achieve all of this in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner, test automation and proactive monitoring is required. Most FAST providers operate several different channels and their AVOD components. Automation allows these providers to measure performance across all of them at once, without hiring an army of manual testers.

FAST channel providers know that ad pods filled with slates (or hard crashes) have a negative impact on user retention, ad impressions and revenue. Using automated technology to monitor FAST channels on real devices enables the measurement of true ad performance. Once the performance has been verified, it can be improved, and ad pods can be filled with dynamic ads instead of blank slates. This helps providers increase ad revenue, build positive word of mouth, and keep viewers watching for longer.

The ultimate goal is to deliver a smooth viewing experience, truly allowing those watching at home to “set it and forget it.” Unlike Cable TV or subscription-based streaming services, FAST channels are marketed on convenience and comfort, not prime original content. In a crowded market, the best way for FAST channels to keep themselves relevant is by delivering stronger performance than their competitors. Life in the “FAST lane” can be a bumpy ride, but monitoring ad performance helps everything go much smoother.