FAST Channel problems? Are you a content owner not seeing actual revenues from your content investments and spending on linear channel creation?
Free Ad-funded Streaming Television (FAST) has had a high exposure as being the next Gold Rush but in reality, the content owners are seeing revenues that could never justify FAST First Productions and it is all to do with the greed in tech.
These are the rules you should follow in moving forward with your content and channel distribution to grow your business to sustainable revenues.
Content is King in FAST Channels
Content has always been king and will always be king in a high percentage of broadcasting business cases.
The audience is watching a TV channel because of the programme on it which is either ad-funded or funded by subscriptions.
If the programmes are not great, the curation is not great and the broadcast quality is poor then very few people will watch it, even if it is free.
FAST Channel Stakeholders
FAST Channels deal with four other major stakeholders, but many more middlemen are hidden.
The Content Owner 46% Ad Dollar
The content owner has a video content archive of TV programmes, movies or documentaries, they broker content on behalf of other people or they produce the content from scratch.
In traditional TV this company deserves around 50% of each ad-dollar.
The Channel Owner 18% Ad Dollar
The Channel owner is the company that curates a 24/7 schedule from a library of content.
The Advertising Agency 15% Ad Dollar
The Advertising agency trades and provides advertising for their clients wanting to advertise their products across a number of channels, choosing demographics, time of day and geographical location.
The Technology Provider 10% Ad Dollar
The technology provider provides the technology for channel playout creation, broadcast transcoding, CDN delivery and advertising insertion technologies.
The Consumer Platform 11% Ad Dollar
The consumer platform is the platform that the general public watch a collection of channels and content through.
Why is FAST Channel Broadcasting Broken?
FAST Channel Broadcasting is broken because the Ad Agencies, Tech Providers and Platforms are taking headline revenue shares which are leaving content owners as low as 15% of revenues. These deals are being struck by inexperienced channel owners being exploited by the other stakeholders.
With Platforms taking up to 50% of revenues and Agencies taking 35% of Ad sales there is not much left at the end of the road for the content owners, but these deals are being struck by Gold Rush motivated Channel Owners thinking they will be part of the DotCom boom 2023 and we all know what happened there.
Is there a future for FAST?
View TV has produced FAST2.0, but even they state that the term FAST is tainted and therefore they have now called it xTV which means Extension of Television.
This service provides an end-to-end solution keeping all stakeholders engaged fairly using a centralised platform and dashboard called View TV Cloud where a standard currency between the parties enables existing broadcasters and content creators to embrace Streaming TV.
View TV Cloud with xTV provides a model which is very similar to the existing television industry for all parties involved requiring minimal channel-to-content production and channel broadcast businesses and more importantly providing the service that audiences demand as they cot the cord.