Free is friendly: the challenges and opportunities of the rise of FAST television

There’s no doubt streaming continues to make waves. In fact, streaming consumption is surpassing viewing time on cable and is trending to be the predominant way of consuming video content overall. This shift brings new and unique opportunities for content providers.  

As recent trends have shown, consumers are already transitioning from subscription-based services (SVOD) to free ad-supported streaming television (FAST TV). While the transition to free shouldn’t come as a surprise, in many ways it is the return to the TV model consumers enjoyed for many years and the plateauing of SVOD growth highlights the shift.  

At Synamedia, we’re digging into how cloud technologies can streamline and even enhance this transition by simplifying processes, bringing new content to market at a higher pace and improving the user experience.  

The Rise of FAST Television 

As consumers reduce their SVOD subscriptions and prices go up, subscription churn keeps increasing. In fact, in the fall of 2022, overall US subscriber churn for SVODs over a six-month period was 44%. Furthermore, providers are dealing with password sharing issues, as half of the U.S. consumers agree they pay too much for SVOD services (about $48 per month on average).  

These challenges are fuelling the shift to ad-supported content. And it makes sense – after all, free is very consumer friendly. Providers are creating new linear and on-demand FAST TV services from their content libraries, and with the broad acceptance of lighter and more contextual ad modes, it’s clearly generating growth of the ad business. In fact, FAST TV streaming services continue to grow, with US and Canadian adults increasing their number of FAST services from 1.5 to 3.9 over the last year – a steeper increase than any other video service. Similarly, in the UK, total viewing hours for FAST services grew 51.3% year over year.

Growing Pains 

This dramatic growth of free ad-supported streaming content brings challenges to advertisers. For example, they must deal with inconsistent offerings from providers. The days of being able to buy a top show on a television network, and knowing it would be the same on every satellite and cable service, are gone by the wayside. Now, the advertising world looks more like digital and the offerings across FAST TV services vary greatly, making it difficult to build audiences, create targets and address that market.  

The growing pains of streaming are something most of us have lived through in other iterations of digital media over the years. Now we’re met with the challenge of finding how we apply the learnings of those past transitions to what we have traditionally seen to be TV advertising. Nonetheless, advertisers are still interested – as they should be – because it continues to be the best way to reach some of these diverse and – in many cases – otherwise unreachable audiences.  

As more broadcasters and content owners explore offering FAST TV services, Synamedia has developed a suite of products that enable them to deploy and launch channels quickly, while leveraging cloud services to deliver efficient scale and performance. By combining Synamedia-powered scheduling, transcoding, packaging, ad insertion, and ad serving, providers can build a FAST solution that enables them to monetise their content with targeted digital ads on all CTV and mobile devices, without the hassle of complex technical integrations. And by managing their own content workflow, providers can ensure higher video quality and keep greater control over the inventory and data that other platforms all want a piece of. 

The platform takes the best of what we know – and what we used to call digital – and combines it with the reach and scale of TV advertising. Synamedia Iris is one such solution for addressable advertising that can bring the power of digital to FAST TV services. With addressable advertising, free ad-supported streaming services can find the right audience for their ads and also push content that resonates with their viewers. As a unified advertising solution, Synamedia Iris also helps services run campaigns across multiple platforms using a single interface, thus reducing silos and saving a few headaches. 

To understand how Synamedia can help you launch FAST, watch our webinar on ‘Maximising the Advertising Impact of FAST’.