Fireside Chat: Evan Shapiro Discusses DirecTV's New FAST Product With Matthew Van Houten
At Streaming Media Connect, Media Cartographer Evan Shapiro interviewed Matt Van Houten, SVP of Advertising at DirecTV, about the company's new fast product, MyFree DirecTV, which integrates free ad-supported streaming channels into the DirecTV ecosystem.
DirecTV’s shift to a streaming MVPD with new products
Shapiro asked Van Houten to provide a point of view of what he does at DirecTV, especially within the context of the company’s recent shift of focus from a traditional Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD) to a streaming MVPD, with a new set of products.
Van Houten said he’s been with DirecTV for almost 13 years. “I’ve been a part of AT&T and all the machinations they had from their 2015 acquisition of DirecTV to the acquisition they had with the NVIDIA ad server, the work they did to acquire AppNexus, which we renamed Xandr. And then obviously the $85 million acquisition for Warner Brothers Discovery. I've been connected to all of those businesses as an advanced advertising lead liaison. I’m maybe one of the OGs of addressable.”
The launch of MyFree DirecTV
Shapiro said, “You’re launching a new FAST product inside the DirecTV product. Can you talk about that [and] how it's going to work?”
“It’s called MyFree DirecTV,” Van Houten said. “[It is] a totally free ad-supported streaming product, a FAST platform designed to deliver very curated compelling content. We've got over 70 FAST channels that are launching. You've got some FAST providers out there with hundreds of channels. We really focused on what we consider to be the best of the best in terms of curation. And I think what's different about us is that we are independent. We are a pure aggregator of content.”
How MyFree DirecTV stands out in the FAST space
Van Houten emphasized that DirecTV is unique because it does not own any of its FAST channels and does not try to force any particular IP on anyone. “We are truly trying to deliver what our audiences look at,” he said. “We know our audiences very well, being around for 25-plus years. [We’ve] got entertainment, sports, lifestyles, and news content in an environment that's actually the exact same content-forward user interface that we use for our pay TV subscriber experience. What we really did here was first light up some FAST channels and put them behind the paywall. They were available to our paid customers, [with] various tiers. We also started to give them access to select FAST channels. We started to trial that, and we found that there was pretty significant engagement. Now, that engagement widely varied by the type of content, whether it was an aggregated FAST channel versus a single series IP channel, for example. Any one of these FAST channels as a standalone really doesn't have, from a viewership and engagement perspective, a tremendous amount of weight to move a multi-billion dollar ad sales business. But when you aggregate up all of the FAST channels, and if I viewed all of my FAST channels as a single channel, it would be a top 50 performing Nielsen-rated channel.”
Why MyFree DirecTV might make FAST channels more profitable in its ecosystem
Shapiro said, “You also seem to believe that the FAST channels pound for pound are going to make more money in this ecosystem than they might in others. Why do you think that is? What will be differentiated here for a publisher versus some of the other platforms they might not distribute on?
Van Houten replied, “I think from an inventory perspective, it is a different type of a deal construct, a different economic construct than your traditional media business, [with] roughly every hour of TV you see there's the 16 minutes of commercials, 14 minutes going to the content creator, two minutes going to the distributor in general, that has been going on for decades and decades and decades. In this case, you've got a lot higher bartering for ad minutes. And so those ad loads look closer to 50/50 share between the content creator and the distributor.”
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