The next in a series of Innovator Spotlights from our Special Report, FASTs Are The New Cable

“Fundamentally, our goal as a company is to allow content owners to stand up their channels very quickly and at a lower cost, which allows them to experiment more by giving them the ability to try a bunch of tactics,” explains Srinivasan KA, Amagi’s Co-Founder. “We provide the data and analytics that allow them to experiment with all sorts of innovations, to see at a better level what is being watched and how they should program. What sort of content should they acquire? How they should promote it. Where should they distribute it? Providing all of that information is very, very powerful. And now we also have a few billion ad opportunities being enabled by our system on a monthly basis, so we're able to actually help them monetize as well by selling the ad inventory for them through both programmatic and direct”

ALAN WOLK (AW): Many people are comparing today’s FAST landscape to the early days of cable. What does and doesn’t ring true to you about that comparison?

Srinivasan KA (SK): I think a reasonably fair comparison right now is the Wild West as people are continually experimenting with a range of different options. Everybody's trying out different things, chasing after the next shiny new thing. The whole FAST ecosystem is still not very mature and is in really early, early days, so that’s not surprising. 

But where the FASTs differ from cable is that today we have tons more data available. So while it’s still early days, we  have real time feedback. Stuff that doesn't work is being thrown away much sooner. The whole industry is maturing at a rapid pace and the iterations are much faster. 

A number of the companies in the space have also built a large presence in social media , so they already have experience doing direct to consumer. So unlike early cable companies, they’re not just winging it. 

Finally, there are a lot more distribution pipelines in the FAST ecosystem compared to cable. You have a wide range of apps and devices where you can distribute content now, plus you are not limited to just the U.S., you can distribute content globally. That was not available in the 80s.

AW: Many people we spoke with assumed that it would just be a matter of time before all the SVOD services joined Paramount+ and Peacock in launching linear channels. Does that sound accurate to you?

SK: Absolutely. We humans are lazy animals. We don't want to spend a lot of energy trying to figure out what we want to watch. And I think there's a time and place for everything. There are times where we want to have a lean forward experience where we're looking for something specific. But there are times where we don't want to, we want somebody else to bring the food to our bed, so to speak. So we just want to lean back and get served with the right curated content.

In terms of linear channels overall, I think substantial credit goes to the user experience of some of these apps, they’ve made it so simple and easy. The device OEMs, for example, have made their FAST apps the default as a channel launch packet. 

Compare that to Netflix, where after 30 minutes of searching for something from their originals to watch, I’m just bored. So if I see something familiar on a Netflix linear, I’m going to go straight to that. 

Overall, I think there is value in a curated experience. Yes there are times I want to choose exactly what I want to watch. But a lot of times I just want somebody to tell me what's great. And that is especially valuable when somebody has already done the work for me, of creating a linear experience of shows I might want to watch.

AW: Do you think we'll ever see personalized playlists based on someone’s existing viewing habits?

SK: 100%, I think we will actually see multiple curated playlists for individual viewers, exactly like the Spotify model.  

Personalization is going to be a big part of the future of the FASTs. What we have done to date is essentially overlaid the traditional cable model on connected TVs. Now we need to start bringing in the advantage of connected TVs in terms of the data that we have. How can we personalize each experience, how can we make those experiences better? So I think that's a natural evolution to get to personalized channels.

AW: What are some of the technical challenges you see when launching a FAST channel or app?

SK: One big challenge is the lack of cue points for where to insert an ad. Network TV shows have cue points built in so that cutting to a commercial isn’t jarring. But with movies, in particular, there is no cue point and you want to place the ads in a way that preserves the customer experience—you don’t want the ads to be jarring the way they can be on YouTube. So you need to have some sort of mechanism as to where to insert the ad pod. That’s something we’ve learned to work with content owners on.

AW: As American TV programmers move to expand overseas, do you think that FAST will become the dominant business model, especially in emerging economies?

SK: Certainly the FAST model will become the default model for many of these countries. The only question that's unclear in my mind is that a lot of these geographies are mobile first, as opposed to TV first the way it is here in the US or in Western Europe. Mobile tends to be not very suitable for a FAST due to the interface challenges. It’s much more suitable for an AVOD sort of experience, something that is more interactive than the lean-back experience you get with linear-based FASTs. I think that's something that's going to be a challenge in those markets and we might have to move back to a more on-demand type model for all these mobile-first markets.