The Long Belated FASTMaster Update
Including FAST key trends in a handsome infographic to celebrate FASTMaster being two!
Hello everyone and welcome to the November update for FASTMaster (yes, in December and having skipped October). It’s been an incredibly busy couple of months for me since leaving Variety, with a three city tour of the US with Xumo interspersed with two trips to Europe combining with a complete rebuild of the FASTMaster database to standardize the data and extend the genre trends back two more years coupled with building out a new FAST product in my role at CRG Global and development of a new division. Oh and I helped to put together the Comcast Ads/Xumo report “The 2023 State of FAST” where Comcast helpfully referred to me as “FASTMaster” in the press release. Just in case you were in doubt ;)
I’ve also been too busy to do a follow-up podcast episode, but that should hopefully change in the coming weeks.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: IF YOU NEED MARKET RESEARCH OR COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS IN FAST, COME TO ME.
(Seriously though, people are already coming to us at CRG Global because traditional research companies do a terrible job defining FAST for consumers and verifying they are actually watching. So come to the one group who knows what to do and will get you results you can rely on).
FASTMaster in the News & Appearances
I may have left Variety in September, but I had a number of articles in the bank which came out through September and October:
Content Strategies of the FAST Free Radicals is an analysis of major entertainment companies who don’t operate a FAST service and the channels that they distribute.
Single-IP Channels in the US: A Status Check is a deep dive into trends within single-IP channels.
Lack of Free Streaming Metrics Leads to Misinformation was both an extension of the call I’ve been leading for years for more information from FAST services to boost the industry, as well as a way to highlight examples of misinformation (the one that always sticks out to me is when one company declared there were English channels on Vix…).
As an aside, it was wild how many seemed to view this as a challenge to put out misinformation. Some of this I attribute to clout chasing versus thinking what is best for the industry and the damage that misinformation can cause among potential advertisers or content licensors, but it was frustrating to note the amount of times this occurs. Whether it is established journalists misremembering facts and not checking, taking datasets that in the MIPTV magazine this year company reps said accounted for 25% of all FAST and saying is fully representative, or putting out press releases for data that when verified with platforms they say has no bearing with reality and on top of that having wildly misleading headlines, there’s been a fair bit of recent information that unless you put the time in to think it through and had access to things behind the scenes, you would draw very different conclusions from.
I had my first guest piece in Variety VIP+ since leaving with what to expect from Disney’s future FAST expansion.
Appearance-wise, you may have caught me at one of Xumo’s FAST events in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York in October and November, where we went through some of the highlights from our recent research and explained some common misgivings that many have about FAST (you can see why I’m hot on misinformation given it often causes these misgivings).
I hosted three panels at MIPCOM on FAST, two within the FAST & Global summit (the first with Fremantle and the second with Xumo and Vizio) and an additional one in the afternoon on free streaming originals with Electric Entertainment and Roku.
Then this week I had the honor of being invited by Love TV Channels to take part in the event celebrating their first year anniversary in Barcelona.
Thank you to Teresa Lopez and team for having me be part of this as well as for having a great first year coupled with well thought-out expansion plans for 2024. Wishing you a lot of success!
FASTMaster Key Trends
This is the reason why you follow the FASTMaster! This month, beset by the tons of additional data cleaning the database has created, alongside wanting to put something out asap as I already missed the second anniversary of FASTMaster (November 2021), I opted to make a flashy infographic with some data highlights. Cunningly this is also a suggestion of what type of custom reports we can create now…
(To prevent confusion, as of November, these are the services tracked: Freevee, Google TV, LG Channels, Local Now, News by Fire TV, Peacock, Plex, Pluto TV, Redbox, Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Sling Freestream, STIRR, TCL TV+, Tubi, Vix, Vizio WatchFree+ and Xumo Play. So the channel counts/distribution are only among those).
That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with highlights from a small study I did for FASTMaster and there will be December highlights coming too once I collect that in the coming week or two. Until then, stay warm and dry!