The Future Of FAST May Not Be On TV

Television has been free and ad-supported since the first TV commercial launched back in the 1940s.

In the mid-2010s, companies like Pluto and Tubi added “streaming” to the equation, thus giving us free ad-supported streaming TV, AKA “FAST.”

[You would be amazed how many times people tell me that they’ve had free ad-supported TV in their country forever, seemingly unaware that the “streaming” part is what sets “FAST” apart… but I digress.]

The conventional wisdom has long been that FAST is something that lives on a TV set, as that is where most viewing happens.

But a new deal between TiVo and Free Live Sports (FLS) shows that the growth area for FAST may be on a new set of streaming enabled screens.

The deal, which gives TiVo viewers access to 45 FLS channels ranging from extreme/adventure sports (e.g., Red Bull TV, Nitro Circus) to traditional sports (Tennis Channel, Golf Network) to entertainment-sports (e.g., World Poker Tour), will not only include smart TVs across Europe and North and South America, but BMW cars as well, via the German carmaker’s DTS AutoStage Video Service.

This may sound like an afterthought— “You want to put it in some cars too? Sure, knock yourself out!” but it’s actually a harbinger of a much larger change in how and where TV is distributed.

The auto market, in particular, has been intriguing to content owners.

Not because they want to compete with Bluey videos for the kids in the back seat, but rather, because as self-driving cars actually become real, the race for ownership of the automobile screen and its captive audience will explode.

Content owners like FLS are aware that all of those automakers will need content—free content in particular—for their cars, while platforms like TiVo now have the ability to deploy both their software and their content on a whole new world of screens.

Feudal Media Has Many Forms

We’ve spent much of the past year discussing the seemingly sudden ascendance of “Feudal Media” which followed the collapse of the monoculture and the migration of FAST content—live sports in particular—to screens beyond the TV is very much a part of that. 

My suspicion is that it will not stop at just cars either. There is no reason, for instance, that a brand like FLS, which offers far more than just the 45 channels TiVo is taking (they have over 300) won’t be able to light up channels on platforms ranging from Twitch and TikTok to Spotify. 

The ultimate goal is to be able to pull viewers in by creating communities and fandoms across multiple platforms. Versus pushing the content out to them and assuming they will somehow find it.

Which is why I’m seeing this deal as the start of something much bigger, something media owners and distributors would be well-advised to keep a firm eye on in the years to come.