Paramount Global's popular FAST (free, ad-supported streaming television) service Pluto TV crossed $1 billion in revenue last year – without one paying subscriber.
As Netflix gets busy revising its business model and adding a cheaper tier with commercials, it’s still behind the curve. The current darling of the streaming industry is FAST, or free ad-supported streaming television. Recreating linear television for the streaming age is a lucrative business: In 2018, Pluto TV founder Tom Ryan sold his company to Paramount Global (then Viacom) for $340 million. Last year, Pluto topped $1 billion in ad revenue.
It’s a delightful reversal of fortune for Ryan, who is now president and CEO of streaming at Paramount. “We launched on April Fool’s Day in 2014,” he told IndieWire, “and lots of people thought we were indeed fools.”
Pluto wasn’t, and FAST isn’t. With results like that, who needs subscribers? The coin of the realm is MAUs, otherwise known as Monthly Active Users. Pluto ended 2021 with more than 64 million monthly active users, according to Paramount financial reports.
Pluto is no dwarf in the streaming universe and neither is FAST. A Thursday Variety Intelligence Platform report on the state of FAST estimated the rapidly multiplying U.S. market to be worth between $5.3 billion-$6.1 billion by 2025. Compared to 2019, that represents growth of 646 percent-763 percent. According to eMarketer, the value of the entire linear and connected TV industry will exceed $93 billion that same year.
In 2021, FAST accounted for about four percent of linear-channel advertising (defined as actual linear TV plus FAST streaming). Other players in the FAST space also include Tubi (bought by Fox in 2019), the Roku Channel (aff) (launched in 2017), the free tier of Peacock (launched in 2020), the just-rebranded Freevee (aka IMDb TV and owned by Amazon), and the built-in services from Smart-TV manufacturers Samsung, LG, and Vizio.
The FAST…