LA FAST/Play: Focus on Time Spent, Monetization, and Aggregation
Amagi’s fifth annual LA FAST conference returned to Los Angeles September 29 with a full lineup of sessions and speakers, a reported capacity crowd, and a brand new title: LA PLAY. As Amagi explained the name change in a blog post wrapping up the event, “A large part of the day’s discussion centered less around FAST and more around a central theme we are seeing at Amagi—the industry’s evolution beyond simply launching more FAST channels toward building sustainable, data-driven businesses around content, audiences, and advertising.”
But much of the one-day program’s traditional focus on Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST), for which Amagi largely built the technological backbone, remained very much in play from a content standpoint. FAST-centric sessions focused on Live Operations on FAST (addressing real-time FAST event coverage), The Next Era of FAST Monetization (examining the “overhaul” of ad inventory to encompass interactive formats and contextual intelligence), and Unifying Media Operations (for live, linear, and FAST workflows).
The sessions on FAST and streaming kept returning to one number: time spent. Where are audiences spending their time, and how can streamers claim a share of those viewing hours?
#GoodLuckStreaming?
Rich Greenfield, Partner and Co-Founder, LightShed Partners, took the stage for a presentation titled “Follow the Money: Unvarnished Market Realities” that looked at the migration of ad dollars and viewer attention and what is causing the new media playbook to take shape in the way it is.
Billed as a “renowned media futurist,” Greenfield spent years mocking legacy TV under the triumphalist hashtag #GoodLuckTV. Recognizing the question is now effectively boomeranging on him, Greenfield said, “The big push that I'm getting is, is it time for good luck streaming?”
Suggesting that specific areas of streaming might be “maturing” beyond their sell-by date, he clarified, “I'm specifically speaking about premium [SVOD]. There is sort of this fear that the business isn't sure.”
Moving the industry to surer footing, he argued, means reading the room and finding new strategies to engage audiences that might not respond to the same approaches that worked a year ago. “What's really interesting is how the conversation over the last, I'd say, 9 months is pivoting pretty sharply to a lot of us sitting in this room. What are ways of leveraging what we already have or what we already do? How do we drive [engagement] in new ways?”
FAST, he argued, is one possible answer to that question. “Whether that is some form of [FAST], whether that is [AVOD], whether that is a linear stream, whether it's vertical video, it's literally looking at all of these things. I think everyone is absolutely looking at YouTube [as] this accelerating freight train, sucking up as much industry time spent as possible. And so everyone else is now looking and going, ‘OK, what are the options? What are our ways of increasing engagement without spending an exorbitant amount of money? And I think they're looking to a lot of these different options.”
Chances are there isn’t just one answer to the question, he argued. “I don't think we have to end up [with an] answer on, is there one strategy that is better than another? I think the likely answer is probably all of the above, right?”
Greenfield alit on a number of other issues related to the “time spent” aspect of maximizing viewer attention-share. What follows are a few other insightful nuggets from his talk.
Beyond the Bundle
On the bundle, and why time spent matters now:
"If we think back, you know, back to 10, 15 years ago, It didn't really matter how much engagement we had. What really mattered was, you were stuck in the bundle. I always [use] the example of AMC or FX Network. They had one or 2 shows at a time. That was enough, and you sort of sustained your subscribers, your subscriber [fee] and didn't get dropped as long as you had a couple of must-see shows. But the actual amount of time spent watching didn't really matter. But now that you're in not just the [SVOD] space, but the ad-supported [SVOD] space, all of a sudden, you don’t sell a lot of ads if you don't have time spent. That’s the major thing that most of these [SVOD] platforms are struggling with. They don't have a lot of time spen[t], and they need to figure out ways to drive engagement—and not just on the TV. Everyone in this room has apps, like Netflix, Paramount+, and Peacock, and my guess is the only time you ever open them up on your phone [is] a sporting event. Most of the time you're not opening them up to watch longform content. Whereas you’re all very comfortable opening up TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube non-stop on your phone. If the end [goal] is time spent, I think every one of the companies that are sitting in this room has been thinking about all of these options as being on the table, and you [should] swiftly try all of them, and not just dabble."
Where Will Your SVOD Content Live?
On SVODs becoming platforms:
"I think every [SVOD] company is going to have to figure out, are they a [platform]? Or are they content that is going to live everywhere else? Is Paramount+ going to live on Amazon, are you gonna watch Paramount+ [on] Peacock. or are you gonna watch it on Netflix? Or is Paramount+ going to be an absolute destination? Are they gonna be a destination and they want to carry every [FAST channel] known to man? I think these are hard decisions. If you're sitting here and you run a [FAST channel], my guess is there's going to be more people interested in your content [from] a platform perspective. Everyone is starting to realize they need to aggregate. You look at the most transformative [things that] happened in the last year. It gets almost no attention because it hasn't [launched] yet. But the fact is that all of Peacock is going to sit inside a YouTube Premium, starting in January, and then Netflix over in France has TF1 broadcast TV service running inside of it. [Warner Bros.'] CW is now moving inside of the ESP[N] Unlimited app. So. you have multiple examples of linear content living inside of somebody else's platform. And my gut [tells me], once you make that leap, you [are] a platform.”
What Can the Two Most Successful Platforms Teach Us?
On YouTube and Netflix:
“If we take CTV as the North Star, the two most successful platform[s] in terms of time spen[t] and overall size and scale are YouTube and [Netflix]. What do those two companies have in common relative to everyone else out there? They have more [content]. There is no doubt that breadth of content, being able to really target very niche audiences, there is substantial value in that. And that really drives engagement, not to mention more and more data points that help you drive an algorithm to actually give the right content to the right person at the right time.”
Bob Iger, Disney, Algorithms, and the Beauty of TikTok and YouTube
Reflecting on Bob Iger’s May 2024 comment that Disney needed to improve its algorithm and homescreen recommendations and the futility of his approach to fixing them:
"I think back to the comment Bob I[ger made], and I kept thinking to myself, it's nice to understand you have a problem. That is certainly a very, very important first step. The challenge is, you can't really fix it with what you're doing. When Disney comes out with Endor, everyone watches Endor. You come out with The Bear, everyone watches The Bear. If everyone in this room is watching the same show for 30 minutes or an hour, you don't get a lot of [signal]. The beauty of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels—the reason these are such huge businesses—is they’re getting so much signal, what you hover on, what you click through, they learn that they're constantly learning it. If you're going to be a platform, you're going to need a lot of content. You're gonna need a lot of content in different forms—shorter-form, longer-form—because the only way you're gonna actually be able to tell the person sitting here or the person sitting there what to watch is to have a really good algorithm. Otherwise, everyone just watches the same [few] things. What all of these services struggle with is they have libraries, but no one's actually watching them, because they don't have the algorithms, they don't have the data to actually understand enough about the user base. So, they have to get more signal to better understand their user so that they can target better. I go onto these apps and I'm horrified at what they recommend. It doesn't make sense. And I'm sure everyone in this room has had the same experience, where you go onto Instagram or you go onto TikTok and it's like, ‘Oh my god, how did they know that I want to see that?’ [Compared to streaming platforms like Disney,] it's night and day. And you're seeing more tech people being brought into these companies, whether it's at Disney or at Paramount."
On CTV Advertising, Premium SVOD, and Consolidation
“Part of the challenge for CTV advertising has just been how fast the growth rate of ad-supported streaming has just exploded. All of these [SVOD] channels, as they maxed out on price for the ad-free subscribers, they had to resort to deeply discounted advertising [tiers]. That has put a lot of pressure on CPMs. Will we get to a point where CTV advertising is good? You can target that gentleman, you know exactly what he wants to watch. You know what he wants to buy. And because of that, all of a sudden, the entire category is growing irrespective of how much is still shifting from [linear]. It's already happening, obviously, with YouTube, because that's part of their core business. I think it is happening at Amazon. There is no doubt Amazon has built an incredible business, not just on their own platform, but through their DSP, [which is] really helping channels across a third-party platform to sell CTV advertising and target better. That obviously hurts some of the legacy [ad]-selling within CTV. But my guess is, you're going to aggregate into 3 or 4 [platforms], like Amazon, YouTube, and Netflix. My guess is there are going to be one or two others at most, and they're going to aggregate a tremendous amount of content. Then you’ll start to get to the point of winning enough scale with enough data so you can actually drive a superior advertising proposition.”
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