The July 2022 FASTMaster Update
Hello everyone and apologies for June’s absence. With the trip to Monaco for the Monaco Streaming Film Festival (where I appeared on 7 panels and won an award for 2022 Streaming Journalist), vacation and preparing the Variety Intelligence Platform FAST report, I didn’t have time to update here.
ICYMI: VIP+ has gone FAST wild in July to tie in with my report and we are running a month of free articles exploring the space. Published already:
How the FAST streaming experience can improve (shout out to DEG for including this in their 12 best articles of the week recap)
There’s a lot more planned for the next few weeks to be sure to check https://variety.com/vip-tag/fast/ at least once a week for more detailed analysis across FAST. And keep the diary free for 3pm ET/noon PT on July 26 for a free Variety webinar on LinkedIn all about FAST with an all-star FASTCAST.
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the FASTMaster, it is interesting to note how Pluto got a ton of press for updating their genres, channel listings, and channel numbers, yet Xumo did the same thing and got jack in coverage. Poor Xumo, how they’ve fallen from when they were the defacto #2 in the industry.
It’ll come as no surprise to note that pretty much every FAST service continues to add channels like there’s no tomorrow (note that News by Fire TV isn’t shown here as I’m working with them on figuring out how many local news channels are FAST and how many are repositories for AVOD-only content).
What I find most interesting is the leap in channels that Local Now made (driven mainly by local news, but other genres too) in the past few months. They’re really trying to offer something for everyone, but I am not sure I’ve ever seen mention of them in the press or any ads for the service, so I’m not sure how they and sister service Sports.TV will grow.
Also note how Roku Channel has grown. They added a ton of Spanish-language channels in June, followed by several NBC News local FASTs but it is wild to consider the service had fewer than 40 channels less than 3 years ago.
Pretty much every service other than STIRR and Prime Video Channels has seen an increase in offered channels across measured months (my records go back to October 2019). It used to be that offering 200+ channels was considered a great deal of choice but that’s effectively baseline in 2022. Pretty soon even 300 channels will be de jour.