Paket CEO Raffi Bagdasarian On Why It's So Tough To Find Something To Stream

As part of our Special Report on the FASTs (free ad-supported streaming TV services), we sat down (via Zoom) with Raffi Bagdasarian, Founder and CEO of Paket Media to discuss why discovery in the various streaming ecosystems was so consumer-unfriendly and how this was impacting adoption.

TL;DR: Platforms want everyone to use their apps. Streaming device manufacturers want everyone to use their channel stores. And no one seems to be asking consumers what they want .

To read the full interview with Bagdasarian and other industry leaders, and to see what we’re predicting for the FASTs in terms of advertising, content and user experience, download the report today. 

Q: What are some of the problems facing the streaming industry?

Raffi Bagdasarian: There's streaming service providers and there's the consumers. I think for consumers, the value prop is pretty crystal clear and there are a lot of people trying to solve streaming media for the end users, right? You have services on one hand, like Realgood which has over 10 million users.

Between Realgood, a service like JustWatch ,and TV Time, you have almost 30 million users globally and the question is, well, why are they going to these third party services to manage what they're watching? It's because there is no solution to manage. For them to say, “Okay, I want to watch this movie, where do I go to find out where it's playing?” That's fine if you have an Apple TV, or if you're locked into Apple's ecosystem, or if you're locked into Amazon's ecosystem.

But that brings me to the problem for the streaming service providers. So you have these platforms that are at scale: Amazon, Roku, Apple TV are the most prevalent of those. These platforms are taking up to 50% of the service providers revenue. And what are they doing with that? They're then competing on the same content market for content.

And I think if you're a streaming service provider, especially as you see the - I don't want to call it an apocalypse - but you see all the moves that are going to be happening over the course of this this year.

You're going to see so many new services launching with a lot of money, a lot of marketing, and they're going to all have some kind of incentive to get you locked into their ecosystem. So if you think consumers are confused now, just you wait, it's gonna get even worse.