It’s time for an emergency discussion about our “no-commitment relationship” with FAST.
There was more bad news for legacy TV networks this week: For the first time since Nielsen started measuring streaming ratings, broadcast, and cable viewership in July accounted for less than 50 percent of total small-screen usage.
But while audiences may be fleeing the linear ecosystems, they’re not abandoning the lean-back content found in traditional services.
Instead, much of that viewing has quickly migrated to free, ad-supported streaming television services such as Tubi, Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel.
FAST platforms, known within the TV industry, are shaping to be the spiritual successors to old-school networks. Like broadcast TV, they’re entirely free (beyond the cost of an internet hookup); like cable, they offer hundreds of channels devoted to various niches and interests.
And viewers are eating them up: This week, Nielsen also reported that combined, the three FAST above platforms accounted for 3.4 percent of all the TV usage last month, collectively outdrawing the viewership of Disney+ (2 percent), Max (1.4 percent), Peacock (1.1 percent) or Paramount+ (one percent). Add in free services not broken out in Nielsen’s survey — such as Amazon’s Freeview, NBCUniversal-owned Xumo Play, and device-specific platforms on Samsung and Vizio —and it’s clear that, as Buffering reported almost two years ago (and a few times since), FAST is becoming a significant force in the streaming universe…