Are FAST Bets Paying Off for Independent Streamers?
Now that FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) has arguably moved past the “landgrab for distribution” phase and matured well beyond its initial preponderance of legacy content, are independent streamers’ investments in FAST proving worthwhile? Execs from Crackle Connex, Tastemade, and DangerTV—all members of the Independent Streaming Alliance (ISA)—discuss the challenges overcome and the challenges ahead in this discussion with Streaming Made Easy’s Marion Ranchet at Streaming Media NYC.
Reflecting on the early days of FAST a decade or so ago, Ranchet remarks, "It feels like the first few years were mostly digital native, social-first companies" like the gathered members of the ISA. "You had an audience, and that supported ecosystem. You were first movers."
And for independent streamers competing in such a new ecosystem, as with any early adopters pioneering a relatively wide-open space, she continues, "There's good and bad with that. As you've said--it's a labor of love, but you have a spot in the game. Fast forward to 2024. It feels harder and harder to get in to get a spot on all of those platforms. So are you happy you started out early and what does that look like today?"
Addressing a group that made big bets on FAST, Ranchet asks, "Did you win your bet?"
Betting on FAST in its Early Days
Tim Ware, EVP Ad Sales at Crackle Connex--one of the longest-standing contenders in the FAST space--says Crackle remains "incredibly excited at the opportunity. That's not without challenges and obstacles, but the first-mover benefit [goes back to] the 2011-ish launch when Sony acquired it from Grouper. And I joke in sales calls that Crackle was AVOD, and we're probably about eight years early, but we did launch side by side with Netflix." Thirteen years on, he says, "We continue to get--for lack of a better term--appointment viewership, but we have legacy brands that give us the opportunity to generate maximum viewership."
"I'm very happy that we did it," says DangerTV Founder/CEO Javier Saralegui, though he quickly qualifies that as he recalls the challenges DangerTV faced early on as a non-creator of original content. "It was very difficult. It wasn't like, 'Oh, let's just take a look' or 'Hey, this is cool. Let's go.' We aggregated content. When you ask somebody in 2017, 2018 for their content for free and in return, they get a rev share, you better be a pretty good salesperson. They were not happy [about it] back then. They were used to getting paid licensees from the cable operators or the cable channels."
But for better or worse, in those days, content owners' expectations of licensing content to upstart AVOD/FAST aggregators for a share of revenue were relatively low. "For us, it was some production companies that were coming out of England. They were like, 'He's a nice guy. Let's flip him some shows.' Then a couple of months later, you come back to 'em with a $10,000 check. They didn't even think you were going to come back. At that point, they roll up their sleeve and they say, 'You can take it.' So it's kind of a momentum thing. If you've got our model where we're rev sharing and you can bring something back to your partner, it makes it a hell of a lot easier."
DangerTV: Find Your Niche, or Your Niche Finds You
Fast-forwarding to today's more established but vastly more crowded FAST ecosystem, Saralegui says, that "Distribution has become a beast. It's very difficult to get on, and you just have to be very creative in terms of the type of content that you go after, the type of people that you're trying to reach. We're minority-owned, but it wasn't like we ever said, 'We are going to program for minorities.'"
Sometimes, he says, a CTV channel's mission isn't so much chosen as thrust upon it, and a distribution strategy can take shape accordingly. "All of a sudden," he recalls, YouTube and Samsung TV Plus come back to us on two different occasions. They say, 'You're reaching 52% black and Hispanic.' And so then we were like, 'Wow.' So we're minority-owned, we're reaching blacks and Hispanics disproportionately, and now all of a sudden the idea is, 'All we need is a mission.' And our mission is to find content and or create it that is representative of the viewership that we're receiving. In our case, it's adventure and adrenaline. There's virtually no one or Hispanic in it. You just don't see it. So you start to look for that, and all of a sudden, the mission brings in energy unto its own combined with the checks that you're starting to make, and then all of a sudden the distribution platforms start paying a little bit more attention to you. That's kind of the way it worked out for us."
"So you got to have the grit at the beginning to go to someone and say, 'This model where you get an MG [minimum guarantee] and there's no risk for you.' And then you found your unfair advantage, right? So finding your niche, your lane, [allowed you to] bring something that no one else could," says Ranchet.
"I don't think I knew what the term 'lane' meant until somebody said, 'You've invented this brand new lane,'" quips Saralegui. "I was like, 'I'm taking that.'"
Tastemade: Life in the Lifestyle Lane
Speaking for Tastemade, a creator of global lifestyle, travel, and culinary shows, GM Streaming Evan Bregman says of the company's plunge into FAST, "The bet has certainly paid off. Streaming is the fastest-growing part of our company right now. Tastemade entered into this maybe a little bit differently than some of the other folks here because certainly at the beginning, what was programmed on the channel was completely owned by Tastemade. And since the very beginning, Tastemade has had a vision of a brand that was very specifically trying to cater to a young, diverse audience who cared about this type of content, but couldn't really find it anywhere else."
Which is not to say lifestyle programming was a wide-open lane, free of other traffic or big-rig trucks. "There's a very obvious 'big other' for us in the lifestyle networks [space] at Warner Bros. Discovery. Today, I think we're in phase two of this large ecosystem development. Phase one was certainly, as you said, landgrab of distribution, and being able to get that broad reach and get deals where Tastemade was able to hold on to at least a piece of the inventory in most of those cases has been key to setting us up to make originals for this space, license and traditional upfront fee license deals, content from all over the world, and launch additional channels today."
But surviving in a fast-evolving FAST world requires anything but a static strategy for continued growth for an independent streamer like Tastemade, Bregman says. "What got us here is not going to get us there. As you say, the glut of new competition entering the world means that we're now competing a lot on brand, where someone comes to the lifestyle section of the guide and they're choosing between America's Test Kitchen and Bon Appetits and many other great brands that have been around for a really long time, and Tastemade, which has not been around for a very long time. And you see a lot of the new channels that are being picked up by the various distributors, typically, are channels or libraries that you would recognize, folks that anybody would recognize from their couch. And so that fundamentally changes how we're going to continue to peak going forward."
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