FASTMaster's January 2024 Update

There are at least 1,958 channels on FAST (you'll read why 'at least' below)

Hello everyone and welcome to our monthly overview of the FAST market in the US. It’s been a busy month for everyone, with conferences and events galore. I sat CES out as frankly I couldn’t spare close to a week out of the office especially with my trip to Barcelona to host the launch of the Titan OS smart TV system.

That event was fantastic. It’s amazing to see a European OS finally enter the space and I’m looking forward to seeing how Titan OS evolves over time within each territory it is in (as that is the promise; each region will reflect local interests and behavior). Congratulations to Jacinto, Tim and the team.

If you haven’t yet read the latest Amagi Global FAST report, allow me to give you one more reason to do so: I wrote the introduction! In case you were missing editorial-type analysis from me deep-diving into a topic, in this case advertising and FAST, I can heartily recommend that. You can find the report here and there will soon be a webinar too.

That’s a great segue into the close cousin of the webinar, the podcast. I am determined this year to make the time to do these frequently, and have hit the ground running. (Confusingly, Substack only lets me put a podcast I record with it under the Podcast tab, so most of the new ones will be under FAST Friends). I began a series with the great Wendy Parkies exploring the potential of FAST in Africa, which you can find below:

I have a number of interviews lined up but let me know if you’re interested in taking part.

You may notice that I finally added a subscription button. The reason for that really is that people kept pledging to subscribe so I figured I may as well grant people their wish! There will always be free analysis here, but subscribers will get access to a very nice monthly report and founding subscribers will also get access to the very flashy FASTMaster chatbot that I have built (and am updating).

One final piece of housekeeping before getting into the nitty gritty this month. Some of you may have received an invitation a month ago for a piece of research we are conducting with FAST Stakeholders at CRG Global. Many thanks to those of you who responded so far. We do need more responses however in order to create the report (which will be free, but shared first with respondents) so if you see a reminder email next week and have a spare 20 minutes, please do spend it with us!

Now for the part we all love: what happened in January.

As is customary in January, many services reduced their channels by a few with the Holidays over. How many channels there are in total is hard to say. Preliminary analysis of 19 services (and a thank you to VIDAA for sharing their channel list) shows 1,958 channels, but this is preliminary as I am still waiting for TCL TV+’s January channels. Once I receive that I’ll update and share the total January figure.

For those who crave a little more information, I have you covered. For January, I am making available the full FASTMaster report which will be available only to subscribers for each month going forward. That’s available to download here and I fully endorse it, not just because I had it professionally designed but because it features:

• Key observations on what was new to FAST in January (such as Hot Ones launching a channel, which services added WBD channels, etc. etc.).

• Lovely visualizations of the trends in channel growth by service, such as this

  

• Data visualization of the changes in channel counts by service (versus 12 months ago and last month), channel breakdowns by language, single-IP channels by service (by English and Spanish), exclusive channels by service and channel attrition (how many channels from 12 months prior remain).

• Perhaps the best thing in the report are the service profiles. I have them for ABC, Freevee, Google TV, LG Channels, Local Now, Peacock, Plex, Pluto TV, Redbox, Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Sling Freestream, TCL TV+ (hopefully), Tubi, VIDAA, Vizio WatchFree+ and Xumo Play. If you’re curious to what information is included, see below:

  

Please take a look and let me know what you think.

As if that’s not enough, I’m also unlocking the analysis I did on TV primetime viewership for a week. You can find the links to the reports here before they go back to being subscriber exclusives. If you want to see great visualizations of how viewership is changing, be it by network or overall trends, download the reports and use the information, in conjunction with trends and data in FAST like what Amagi and Comcast have published, to win at distribution in FAST.

I feel like that wraps up everything I had to share this month in terms of updates. Please let me know what you think of the new reports, take part in the survey and be on the lookout for more podcast interviews with influential FAST execs soon.

Best wishes,

Gavin