FASTs, Personalization Were The Watchwords At The Stream TV Show This Year

1. The Year Of The FAST

The Stream TV Show in Denver is a phenomenal event in general, but especially phenomenal if you want to get a sense of where the industry is headed. It’s a good mix of people from the advertising, content, distribution and tech sides of the industry, so a more all-encompassing point of view than many of the industry’s more ad-focused events.

In other words, not a lot of people there were headed to Cannes next week. 

There were two key themes this year: the growing ubiquity of FASTs (both channels and services) and the trend towards personalization.

But what struck me was less the massive focus on FASTs than the massive disconnect between the FAST channels so many people are trying to “stand up” and what the major FAST services are actually looking for.

It’s a big ass gap.

Why It Matters

Back in the day, the FASTs would take pretty much any content they could get their hands on, mostly series that Netflix and Amazon didn’t want and stand them up as either linear channels, on-demand libraries or both, depending on the nature of the deal.

It made sense at the time, in that they had no leverage to get anything more desirable, not to mention no money.

That was then though, and today, as the FASTs become big time players, what we are seeing  (as outlined in this article from a month or so back) is a “push to quality.” Meaning that they are consolidating their offerings, getting rid of lower quality and less popular content and bringing in more premium programming, including originals.

They’re also curating their own channels big time.

Which makes sense because it’s a way to set themselves apart. At a time when fairly hip publications like Vox and The Verge are still (May 2023) running articles about “this cool new way to watch TV called a FAST” there are still a lot of people unfamiliar with the genre. And more premium content is going to be a great way to get them to stick around.

It’s also a way to keep things fresh. FASTs are privy to all sorts of data around viewership and viewership patterns—who watched what and what they watched after, what other genres mystery fans like, does changing up the title of a channel increase viewership, etc.

They are constantly looking at ways to optimize the content they have on their services and the more control they have over that content, the better.

At the same time, however, there’s a strong vibe of “you too can start a FAST channel!” hanging over the industry.

As in, anyone with the rights to some content and/or a half-baked concept can go out and get their “channel” picked up by one of the FASTs. 

This is not the case.

Yes, there is still heart for pre-baked channels if you’ve got Westworld or NCIS or a really well-curated set of content geared at the sort of underserved audience that is likely to bring more viewers to the service.

But a channel based on Austrian sitcoms of the 1980s probably does not have a shot.

Point being, there’s a certain level of willful deafness from many in the industry to the more proactive role the FASTs are currently playing in content curation, a role made even easier and more proactive by the massive amount of data they now have access to.

So not a huge market for random FAST channels.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re thinking of standing up a FAST channel, be prepared to go it alone, rather than relying on getting picked up by one of the bigger services. It’s possible—there’s a whole organization called the Independent Streaming Alliance that was announced at the Future Of FASTs Funshop this week—but it also requires you to have a really solid idea and some content you know there’s an audience for.

If you’re one of the big FAST services, keep on keeping on: another point in that TVREV FAST 2.0 article was that we’d be seeing beefed up branding efforts from all the big FASTs as they try and find a lane to differentiate themselves from their peers.

Better curation is definitely a part of that.

2. Generative AI and Personalization

A more positive theme from the Stream TV Show was the potential of generative AI (or algorithms called “generative AI” by the marketing department) to personalize everything from programming schedules to recommendations to ads.

It’s one of the most promising ways I’ve heard of to make use of all the data that is now available in a way that makes the whole experience better for all parties involved, everyone from viewers to advertisers to the FASTs themselves. 

Provided, of course, we don’t start using the data in ways that seem creepy and intrusive.

You know, like the internet.

Why It Matters

Personalization needs to be done with a light hand. All too often it gets a little too ahead of its skis (or a lot) in that “you watched a murder mystery last week, so now all we are going to show you is murder mysteries” kind of way.

AI really does hold a lot of promise though, for everything from helping to create better metadata around shows (TV metadata is a wet hot mess) to allowing for the creation of personalized channels a la Spotify’s Daily Mixes to more personalized streams on an existing channel. (Meaning that if a channel has 140 titles, they’d get served up in a different order to each viewer or group of viewers.)

Which is another thing that generative AI might have the answer for: how to create recommendations for the entire family on movie night and similar situations where traditional recommendations fall short.

There are all the commerce options too, where various items in each scene can be made shoppable, the options loading on an app on your phone. Yes, we’ve tried that before, but with solutions that were clunky and hard to use. And as we’ve learned over and over again, timing is everything.

Then there’s brand suitability, something that’s becoming a bigger issue on TV than brand safety. Yes, there are no terrorist videos on TV, but if you’re a restaurant chain, do you really want your spot running during a scene where one of the characters has a stomach virus?

So there’s all that too.

What You Need To Do About It

Slow and steady is going to win the day here. Resist the urge to show off what AI can do and introduce personalization incrementally, so you don’t freak anyone out.

For things like brand suitability and alternatives to thirty second spots though, the sky's the limit. 

A good rule of thumb is that if it affects consumers, go slow, if it affects advertisers or content providers, go fast.

Pun very much intended.