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How Inconsistent Reporting Hurts FAST Channels

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Learn more about the FAST and OTT analytics at Streaming Media West 2021.

Read the complete transcript of this video:

Allan McLennan: May I ask--give me a ballpark--about your audience size. Overall how many, how many viewers do you have on a daily or monthly basis?

Jeff Clanagan: That's an interesting question, and it's a data question. So here's one of the frustrations of having a FAST channel: My dashboard on Tubi gives me impressions and revenue, which is great because I can see the revenue every day. I can't tell you how big my artist is on Tubi. I can tell you I'm generating money and we're getting inmpressions. Now, if you go to my Pluto dashboard, I can tell you what my audience is on a daily basis, on a Monday. I can tell how many minutes they're watching. If I go to my Roku dashboard, it's giving me rankings and stuff like that. Every dashboard is different, and that's probably the biggest frustration for me. So I can't tel you how many people. I can tell you that last year when we were still building, we did over 3 billion minutes of a time. I could tell you on Pluto to the point exactly how many viewers we have, but I can't tell you necessarily all the raw data. I can give you some estimates and subs. Mike, I don't know if you have any input on it, but every platform, the way they are reporting, like with Pluto--even with Peacock, with revenue. I can't tell you how many numbers I've got.

Mike Green: Jeff, do you get more information back than if you had made the same channel and it sent it off to Comcast in the old model?

Jeff Clanagan: There you go.

Mike Green: I'm curious. Do you program the same virtual channel for all of those FAST partner platforms?

Jeff Clanagan: No.We have a channel, but I don't have the same content on every platform.

Mike Green: So that's where it gets interesting, is picking. And especially as you start having this greater direct-to-consumer relationship of your own, what you choose to put where, your windowing strategy, your programming and licensing strategy.

Jeff Clanagan: Exactly. And a lot of it is, I'm going to put my premium content where I've seen the most engagement and generated the most revenue. So I kind of keep that on our premium channels, but it's difficult because--and I'm sure this will resolve at some point--there's no uniform reporting across all these platforms.

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