LONDON TV SCREENINGS: With the BBC Studios Showcase kickstarting a week of TV screenings in the UK capital today, the topic of FAST won’t be far from discussions. Here, we catch up with Beth Anderson, senior VP and general manager of FAST channels and VoD sales for BBC Studios North America and Latin America, to hear about the state of the sector.

Beth Anderson

Could you give us a snapshot of the FAST market right now, and how it’s changed in the last couple of years?
The FAST market has evolved so rapidly. It started from fairly modest beginnings back in 2018, and we’ve been in the business since 2019. And I’d say in the last couple of years there’s been amplification of platform access. What’s really interesting about FAST in general is that we tapped into what was special about linear. We had almost a couple of decades of explosive environments of VoD, and that was high appeal for a lot of consumers. And now we have a couple of decades’ worth of people who haven’t had linear experience in the US.

The FAST model appears to have traction with this base and answers the call for a simpler path through content saturation. We have an embarrassment of riches, with so much programming access that it’s quite hard to navigate. The role FAST has started to play after its fairly technical beginnings is to have essentially TV fans create love letters, mix tapes for audiences and bring to light some shows that otherwise consumers wouldn’t have come across.

What are some of BBC Studios’ activities in this space and how have those activities changed?
We started off with two channels back in the day, and we called them pop-up channels because we didn’t know they were going to stick around. Actually, those two channels, Classic Doctor Who and Antiques Roadshow, are still going strong five years later. But now we have 18 FAST channels in the US and we have seven channel brands in EMEA across a huge number of markets.

We have a lovely collection of channels in three buckets, the first being single-IP channels, like for Antiques Roadshow or Top Gear. Then we have BBC-branded genre channels, which are more collections based around a mood state. That includes anything from BBC Food to BBC Travel to BBC Gameshows.

The third bucket is about supporting our direct-to-consumer initiatives, because the one thing about FAST is that it’s not a replacement media, it’s a complementary media, and it can feed into a broader media ecosystem. So for us, that is represented with BritBox Mystery, which is essentially a chance for people who have never come across BritBox to watch some of the shows on there.

The Classic Doctor Who FAST channel started life as a ‘pop-up’ channel

The FAST boom was built on legacy brands; what can you tell us about the move to original content?
The subject of exclusive or original programming on FAST comes up a lot. It’s a super-exciting area and there’s a lot of reach in this space. In FAST, you have huge numbers coming from the likes of Tubi, from Pluto… Samsung recently said it has 88 million monthly active viewers.

The economics and the healthy audience is certainly there in droves, but it’s not designed to be a replacement for broadcast TV. It works best as a media flywheel. You might find original programming coming into FAST and then appearing in other aspects of that ecosystem. And that might be in partnership with, say, an OEM like Vizio, LG or Samsung, or it might be with someone like Pluto, which is also very tapped in with Paramount+.

That’s where the most likely area for original programming will come in. Now, obviously, the BBC has a lot of shows that people haven’t seen in the US. So, technically speaking, a lot of what we do in FAST is original content already. It hasn’t been seen in America. FAST is a really great outlet for us, but we don’t consider it to be the beginning, middle or end of a life cycle. We think it’s a really great marketing engine that could premiere a show that then has a longer life in an on-demand model or even paying back to broadcast.

Other BBC FAST channels dedicated to single IP include one for Antiques Roadshow

What do you think about FAST’s changing position in the international coproduction landscape?
At the beginning, FAST was certainly regarded as a tertiary model. We’ve had the AVoD business for the last 20 years, that’s not a new business, and it has been the last destination for content after it’s had some premium, almost pay-per-view environments, replicating what we see in the theatrical business.

But YouTube is the number-one destination for any viewer under the age of 35 right now. There is now a premium nature to ad-supported that wasn’t there before. It’s super interesting to see how we can begin to tap into where audiences are. I consider audiences to be like birds on the wing, a sort of murmuration, and it takes just one bird to change direction and the entire audience flocks to a new destination. We have to be, as a media industry, ready to embrace where the most popular medium is.

I think that it’s a super-interesting area, and you might see things like coproductions happening with brands, rather than necessarily just the platforms, or maybe some kind of trifecta of platform, content owner and brand coming together.

What are your predictions for the FAST business in 2025 and beyond?
This will be an interesting year. We’ll continue to see an expansion internationally. And, for the FAST space especially, we can expect to see some of the incumbent partners in certain markets taking on a FAST business model within their existing frameworks. I think we are going to see more engagement for linear than we have done in previous years.

There’ll be more responsibility for content owners to come up with good ideas. It’s less about spaghetti-sticking now. It’s more about making sure what you’ve got is not just enough but really means something to an audience.

The other thing we’re starting to see is the engagement of content creators in the FAST space. MrBeast and Roku recently announced a partnership, for example. You will start to see some of the pieces within the YouTube ecosystem branch into some of these [FAST] areas and vice versa.

We can expect that original FAST experiment that YouTube did about 18 months ago to probably have a resurgence as well. Certainly, I think FAST is probably going to become a term that is more ‘digital linear streaming’ than FAST. It’s a fun acronym to say, but the sector is bigger than that now.