Brielle Urssery Mansa Head of programming
Can you name the key impacts of FAST’s recent growth in media and entertainment? There are several factors impacting the recent growth of FAST. Among the top are consumer subscription fatigue and over-saturated AVOD libraries. Moreover, convenience reigns supreme. With so many platform options – each with of thousands of hours of content organised into hundreds of genres, categories and carousels – curated channels dedicated to a specific brand, genre or series (single IP) are attractive to consumers, content owners/rights holders and advertisers alike. Which FAST tools or channels are you most excited about? I’m most excited about the continued distribution of our first FAST channel, Mansa Mix. It offers a curated selection
of films and TV series that amplifies and celebrates the richness of Black culture from around the globe. I’m proud to bring Mansa’s extensive collection of authentic Black stories to FAST. Though FAST has experienced vast growth, Black viewers continue to be undervalued. I’m hopeful that in the near future, FAST will meet the demand for more representative content for the Black audience and other underrepresented groups. What are the key benefits to implementing FAST into your business strategy? Among some of the key advantages of FAST are low barriers to entry, easy content discovery and highly customisable content experiences for both viewers and brands. FAST allows platforms and advertisers to effectively reach and target audiences at scale.
From a content owner’s view, placing FAST into your strategy presents a fairly streamlined way to create incremental revenue whether you’re licensing content to a third party or developing and distributing your own channels. What does the future hold for FAST? FAST’s future resembles a love child of cable and broadcast, featuring more local channels with sports and live events, entertainment niche channels focusing on popular IP and spin-offs, as well as occasional studio/distributor branded channels showcasing their curated movies and series. The days of unsold ad slots and ‘Be right back’ countdowns where ads should be running are numbered. Platforms will dissolve underperformers and channels featuring low-quality content – leaving only the strong to survive. preferences from the audience. There is a growing consumer appetite for variety, while consumers are also cancelling OTT subscriptions and looking for free ad-based alternatives, such as FAST channels. This gives M&E companies the perfect opportunity to invest in high- quality, low-latency FAST and streaming content with more scalable workflows. What does the future hold for FAST? We predict more companies will invest in FAST TV. Consequently, they will realise that content distribution needs to change to software-defined video networks to meet the requirements of high-quality, low-latency, or file-based video delivery over the internet. From a livestreaming perspective, this means they will have more flexibility – from multiple different clouds to open protocols – to close deals with rights holders at the very last possible minute.
Paul Calleja CEO GlobalM
Can you name the key impacts of FAST’s recent growth in media and entertainment? The rise of FAST is reshaping streaming, pressuring providers to offer adaptable, user-friendly features like on-demand and personalised content. This requires cloud innovation throughout the content delivery ecosystem, not just where the content meets the consumer. Leveraging the cloud for contribution allows flexibility and control across the delivery chain. Which FAST tools or channels are you most excited about? As a contribution service, we at GlobalM are excited about our software-defined video network, which connects cloud contribution services with high-demand FAST workflows. It can scale to multiple takers, allowing one stream source pod to expand to multiple stream destination pods – all with their own unique stream
URI for each destination. This ensures fast, secure and efficient live and file-based contribution from point-to- multipoint, crucial for FAST channels.
What are the key benefits to implementing FAST into your business strategy?
For technology providers like GlobalM, implementing FAST into a business strategy is responding to an industry trend that will only continue to grow, as streaming and OTT platforms start to look for alternatives so they don’t lose viewers. Organisations who see this and can offer scalable and reliable solutions across all touchpoints will be driving the future of content delivery. Why should M&E pay more attention to FAST? FAST TV is simply a response to the increasingly different viewing
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