How to Move FAST Forward: Six Action Items for Free Streaming's Future
Dive into any discussion of FAST these days and you’ll find your feet stuck in mud within one or two steps. I was hoping my specially curated Streaming Media panel would identify low-hanging fruit for us to pick and eat.
We titled it FAST Forward, and the topic we addressed was “How platforms and providers can better serve their channel customers.” Featured speakers on the panel included:
• Todd Hay, VP of Revenue and Engagement, Plex
• Abhishek Neralla, Senior Director, Media and Content Services, A+E Networks
• Alia J. Daniels, COO & Co-Founder, Revry
• and Laura Florence, SVP Global Channels, Fremantle.
Some of the topics we set out to resolve included how to better fill ads, collapse the pod, monetize slates, or more easily automate heterogeneous ad break requirements for each platform distribution. Given the snapshot of the industry our discussion produced, I did my best to make lemonade out of sour phrases like “abysmal fill rates,” “metadata mess,” “gaslighting the definition of audience,” and “data opacity.”
Given the challenges that bubbled up in the panel regarding the issues regarding the current state of FAST infrastructure, here are six key action items to move our industry forward.
Action Item #1. Advocate for a FAST Inter-op
Cable has CTAM and SCTE. Broadcast has SMPTE and VSF. Even shiny plastic discs had DVD-Video.
You might think IAB covers standards for FAST but how many of the playout and infrastructure vendors are active members? Are any of them conducting inter-ops at CES or NAB?
Every single panelist agreed with me that we have an urgent need for an effective, open standard for more advanced monetization workflows in FAST. For this panel, we defined this more toward the “CTV OEM corner of the ecosystem” since the big whales today (Netflix, for example) can deploy whatever workflow they want. Smaller publishers need vendors. Vendors don’t love to interoperate.
And so we discussed the role of the recent IAB working group seeking to standardize advanced TV ad formats like picture-in-picture and pause ads, two obvious candidates for growth.
Given the level of TV device and app platform fragmentation in our industry today, compounded by the explosion of inventory that no one can fill, it’s now a sine qua non for our industry to develop standards around these topics.
Laura Florence painted the picture best. “In broadcast, we have control of the experience, and we at Fremantle know exactly what is best for engagement with our audience,” she said. “We also sell ads and we know what’s most scalable with our advertising partners. We do a lot of innovative formats on our broadcast network.”
But navigating these different platform requirements, having to create costly new feeds for each platform, rather than one feed, simply results in massive costs given current infrastructure architectures.
“Standardization would help us a lot,” Florence said. “Just settling on a few things that all the platforms can agree are required, or not required, could help. Fill rates are at historic lows, as are CPMs. Finding engaging formats that aren’t just adding more ads to an ad pod is important. Whatever the platforms and all of us can decide on, if we can make it a standard, we can automate it much more efficiently.”
With hundreds of channels globally, Florence explained how quickly the fees and labor costs add up, making anything interesting economically infeasible. “A lot of these ad formats are very manual right now. Yes, there are all these pioneering new efforts to engage with things like graphic overlays in a programmatic workflow. I’m genuinely agnostic to the standard, each platform should just spick what the best experiences are for their viewer. Pluto is an older customer base. We're seeing Amazon being a little bit younger or broader. We don’t care which way it goes. We just need to start getting into the nitty gritty of this right now, which is what a standardization effort could catalyze.”
Action Item #2. Mine the IP Archive and Get Social
We did have one strong bright spot for a strategy to pursue if you own your own IP and have a strong social presence.
Again, Laura Florence: “Fremantle has a consortium of a ton of different production teams all situated all over the world. And so our team works with them and then other internal departments to coordinate the opportunities for FAST and broadcast channels.”
A great example? Acquired by Fremantle in 2009, maker of Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers, was tapped to re-activate Fremantle archive IP, Monster Garage.
“So we took Monster Garage, a show that ran for 10 years, restored it to HD, and Original Prods used that relaunch to leverage the launch of a brand new channel, called Rig TV, which is a brand new channel we specifically created for these shows,” Florence said. “And because Fremantle owns all of our IP, we are able to go back on social media and do coordinated outreach as one several tactics to drive awareness and discovery.”
That kind of excellent blocking and tackling also opens up unseen opportunities. As they launched Rig TV, luck met preparation.
“I take a 360-degree approach on these, just like I did when I was on the platform side of this business,” Florence explained. “It’s about bringing teams together to understand what we're driving to, educating our touchpoints. And during that process, it turns out at the same time, we were working with Jay Leno on a YouTube show, an extension of a show that was on NBC. So right there, we were able to bring that show as a FAST-first original production, also onto Rig TV.”
That’s just the broadest part of the push. “We will also do narrower, more targeted technical approaches, let's say with Plex, or with Pluto, tactics that will appeal to those viewers,” she continued. “We have a lead that works with the corresponding marketing lead at those companies to come up with dedicated campaigns for specific platforms. All these platform audiences are unique. The platforms know better who their general viewer is. We know our customers that watch our shows and engage with our social well. So, it’s about being thoughtful and tactical about what the mission is with respect to driving awareness and why.”
The strategic use of social platforms not only promotes content but also creates a community around it. This also enhances the viewer’s experience and is increasingly vital for success.
Action Item #3. Talk to Your Vendor About EPG Dysfunction
Todd Hay from Plex highlighted the ongoing challenges with metadata management, a critical component for user engagement and content discovery. According to Hay, very few publishers provide adequate EPG-related metadata, and this directly and negatively impacts the viewing experience.
“I would say probably 25 percent of our publishers across the few thousand channels we have are giving us enough of the metadata we need.” What they need but aren’t getting, he said, is “basic stuff: the actual airings, the descriptions of the airings, the cover art. We probably have five or six different metadata sources that we have to pull together now. Plex wants to have as much information on all our content, no matter where it is. But that means that we're doing a ton of work to match what we're getting from the EPG to what we already have, to what we don’t have control over for that given content provider.’
Research published in Ring Digital’s Spring 2025 #FutureOfTV survey showed that 29% of TV viewers use the TV Grid Guide when they watch. For them, accurate metadata is essential for a decent experience. And this is a challenge that is rising over time as more channels and apps proliferate.
Channel publishers deserve vendors that enable strong EPG metadata validation, enhancement, and publishing tools. Playout is the ultimate source of through for what’s about to be on-air, as it were.
But this is about much more than the EPG. Indeed, the same research above found that 50% of viewers watch TV by channel surfing. If you surf to a channel that is showing a “We Will Be Right Back” slate, that EPG metadata, with some AI pixie dust, can perhaps add dynamic creative to that slate, like the name of the show that the feed will be returned to after the break.
Abhishek Neralla of A&E Networks weighed in on this point. “Metadata has always been a big challenge,” he said. “Each of the many platforms we distribute to has their very own unique requirements about everything from ad-break signaling to the various language requirements, to the region you’re distributing to, to the ratings of the content. Some platforms specify have word limits, or a certain lens they want to put on the content, descriptions, titles, word counts, or disallowed characters.”
Action Item #4. Fight for Audience, Create an Exchange
We were lucky to have a FAST pioneer with a unique targeted audience on our panel: Alia Daniels, COO & Co-Founder of Revry. She gave us a clear peek into the challenges of smaller content publishers working in an industry dominated by big players and platforms that are continually working to disrupt TV for their own aims.
Since 2016, Revry has been selling to brand advertisers. And for just as long, brand advertisers have been asking Revry to provide them additional scale. So they did.
“Two years ago, we launched PrismRiot,” a “multi-minority certified premium LGBTQ+ advertising exchange,” Daniels recalled. “We have a range of partners in that ad exchange. One of those great partners is with us here today, Plex. This was a huge effort: direct contracts with buyers and platforms. This allows us to sell ads to verified, first-party Revry audiences while they are on Plex, extending our inventory from our owned-and-operated app onto their platform.”
This audience is highly targeted. It’s verified with hashed data. It’s consistently contextually identified as LGBTQ+ across pretty much every outlet.
“The problem is that if you are a CTV advertiser, you’re probably buying through The Trade Desk. Well, they are refusing to transparently represent our verified audience in the right way… They disregard our commercial relationships and categorize us as a reseller. Instead, they want us to give them our data and leave us a cut. They can flood the LGBTQ zone and we get less control, and lower price points for our CPMs. We’re not going to sell out our viewers for a quick buck like that. Our audience trusts us to protect their data.”
Daniels also made a critical point about this relating to the advertising value proposition in general. What does the word “audience” mean?
“The thing is, for us, we sell LGBTQ better than anybody else,” she said. “We know our market. We are constantly in the trenches. We know what the data is, we know what our partners want to see, we know how to talk to them about this targeted population and therefore how to sell the inventory for a much higher CPM than our partners ever will. At the end of the day, our partner platforms are selling, to Laura’s point, a very general idea of an ‘audience.’ What does that mean? Our audience are Revry fans. They’re comprised of real people that watch hours of great content a day. It’s not just an abstract set of data.”
The key takeaway here is clear: If you want to support premium ad pricing, you can’t ignore the subtle differences in these two meanings of the word “audience.”
Action Item #5. Manifest Destiny: Control Your SSAI, Ad-Serving, and CDN
“Excruciating.” That’s how Plex’s Todd Hay kicked off the SSAI round of our discussion by helping to elucidate one of the messy challenges of inventory splits, publishers and their SSAI technologies, and so much more.
“Theoretically, we own 45% of the inventory, so we should be able to launch certain formats and initiatives with that,” Hay said. “But at any given ad request, we don’t know at an existing moment whether that is ours or our partners. These technologies have to play together.”
He listed plenty of experimentation and creative ideas, and affirmed for the audience and our industry that the economics of the space demand such hard work and Plex is all-in on it. But he also reminded us how complex openness can be.
“On our platform, the content provider chooses the SSAI provider. We empower them. So we have fantastic relationships with almost all of the top studios and brands. But that means I have a half a dozen to eight different SSAI stacks that I'm trying to integrate with. And it even touches back to the EPG, how that plays with things like collapsing pods, and the enormous complexity of this puzzle.”
The answer, he said, is clear: Targeting, through data, through creative ad formats, innovative ways of doing that.
“As a platform, we’re investing, whether it's pause ads or interactive or transactional ads. But then it’s difficult, I’ve got to align many stakeholders at that point. Can we run these transactions on their content? And then I’m totally dependent on the SSAI providers to be able to implement. But to your point, no standards. So now, not only do I have to have all the commercial and legal agreements in place so it’s OK to run these on their content, now I am dependent on these varies SSAI stacks to be willing to implement it.”
Without the standard outlined in Action Item #1 above, our industry can’t even point to a standard and ask for compliance.
“So,” Hay lamented, “we end up in this very sparsely populated inventory when we're trying to sell these higher-end creatives.”
Florence jumped in with more detail still. “I think that's been interesting for us, this idea of the importance of SSAI and CDN. With Roku and Samsung and the others that have taken control over SSAI and CDN, for those particular reasons you’ve discussed around ad formats, that while it limits us in visibility, it may well allow for optimal uptime and performance for the platform because you have one unified supply chain that you can actually see and control. But then you have to be willing to take that work on, across all of it. So there’s some big pros and cons here.”
Hay replied, “And with Roku, it’s different than Fire, it’s different than Samsung, which is different than tvOS.”
Action Item #6. Get in the Data Loop
Finally, partnerships and collaboration also extend to the use of data to maximize revenue. "The fun part is, we’ve been able to create our own ad sales team, and what's really important for everyone that sells in the space now is to be in the data loop,” Florence explained. “My counterpart that runs our advertising division talks about this a lot, and part of the reason why is because you can see exactly what brands are buying in real time.”
This real-time data visibility creates opportunities for content creators that weren’t possible in traditional broadcasting models. With direct access to advertising insights, publishers can develop more targeted content experiences alongside their platform partners and go directly to those advertisers with much more concrete, compelling pitches.
“As the publisher who creates the production, literally makes the content on a daily basis, I can provide with our brand partnerships team a huge opportunity to make new content with us,” Florence said. “Current content, bespoke content, if you're our number one buyer, I can create assets for you and execute them in all these thoughtful ways across social, YouTube, our fashion channels, really everywhere."
But it’s important to recognize that the industry has fundamentally changed from the old broadcast and cable paradigm where content owners, broadcasters, and publishers controlled the entire stream. Now, they have to share the infrastructure with platform partners and create value from both sides—from publishers that understand their content intimately, and from platforms have deeper visibility into user behavior and optimization.
The challenge, according to Florence, is educating the market about this complementary relationship. “I’m convinced that together we can sell out 100 percent of our inventory. The challenge right now has been educating the market that we can do both. We can both win 100 percent of the inventory, and, we can also split that ad pod four ways.”
“This is the next journey for all of us across the supply chain. We each do something well and as a partnership we complement each other. I’m not competing with you. I’m trying to sell Family Feud! You're trying to sell your platform. And yes, I see you, Alia. Yeah, that’s a high-five for me. We’re right there.”
I couldn’t have scripted a better ending.
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