How FAST Channels Solved a Major Flaw with Streaming
By Movieguide® Contributor
Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) has become a major player in the entertainment industry by solving the issue of paralysis by choice which has plagued streaming platforms as their libraries balloon.
Anyone who has used a streaming platform has felt the weight of choosing the show or movie they are going to watch when there are thousands to pick from. This can result in an hours-long search as the viewer seeks the perfect show or movie — which they ultimately never actually find.
While streaming first became popular because it provided consumers with a choice in content that was absent from cable, this feature has now become a drawback. This is where FAST channels come in, providing consumers with the ability to choose the general content they want to watch while removing the choice paralysis that comes with thousands of available titles.
FAST channels have exploded in popularity in recent years, even beating out some major streamers like Max and Paramount+ when it comes to TV usage. They also have the added benefit of being free, a significant draw as streamers continue to hike prices.
These channels, however, are not only lucrative for consumers but offer significant upside for distributors as well. FAST channels are incredibly cheap to run, costing as little as $1,500 per month, compared to linear TV which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to operate.
“Assuming you’ve got some content — and a lot of the people who run these channels own content — then your starting economics start to become very attractive, assuming you can sell the advertising,” said Ampere Analyst Guy Bisson. “You can run a channel very cheaply, and thus make a viable business of it in a way that you simply could not have done before streaming came along.”
The cheap entry point, however, has become a major problem as hundreds of FAST channels pop up every year creating a saturated market that could begin to again cause choice paralysis — the problem they exist to solve. Those in the industry, however, believe a major culling is coming, and the number of FAST channels available will drastically drop in the coming years.
“Part of the reason to have these FAST channels for library content is it can be a solution for the paradox of choice,” said Adriana Waterson, executive vice president of insights and strategy lead at Horowitz Research. “But I don’t think you solve the paradox of choice by creating a new paradox of choice with 1,000 FAST channels to choose from.”
“The FAST environment is not infinite, as much as people would like to think they can just throw up a channel and make it work,” Waterson added. “There is going to be natural selection there. There is going to be pruning.”
Movieguide® previously reported:
While free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) is more popular than ever, with over 1,500 total channels, experts believe this growth is unsustainable and the industry is on the verge of major cutback.
“[FAST has] been in this period of growth and now we’re at, or almost at, the point of shifting into optimization…You’re going to see, I think, over the next 12 to 18 months, a culling of channels,” saidSam Harowitz, Fox Corp.’s VP of content acquisition and partnerships. “It’s no longer going to be cost-effective to maintain and launch channels.”
There are currently over 1,500 channels on the FAST marketplace. Harowitz predicts that it will soon fall to 1,000 channels.
While a 33% cut would typically be seen as bad for an industry, in this case, it might help FAST channels, as the paralyzing number of choices currently available was one of the problems the FAST model was created to combat.
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