How Automation Accelerates FAST Channel Growth
Competing in a crowded FAST market often means spinning up and programming FAST channels, well, fast, and the need for channels to perform reliably across different platforms for diverse audiences in a fragmented CTV market complicates the challenges considerably. In this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2026, A+E Global Media’s Abhishek Neralla and Katapy’s Stuart Bishop discuss how automation is deployed to meet those technical and strategic challenges from the perspective of a major content owner that expanded and positioned its channel offering quickly, and from the angle of a technology provider that automates FAST channel management, distribution, and monetization.
Automation No Longer the Exception but the Rule at A+E
Ashling Digital’s Michael Nagle launches the discussion by describing A+E as a company that “has its footprints in the very early days of cable television,” and prompts Neralla, “Talk to me a little bit about how automation allowed the company to move towards this new world [of CTV and FAST] and to how it plays into your management of the channels that A&E stands up today.
“We started off with one channel,” Neralla recalls.”"Sifting through the thousands of hours of content that we had across the decades was a challenge. Automation really came into play later on when we were forced to look at each partner having their own specs [across] dozens of platforms” on which A+E content and channels are delivered.
Today, he explains, “automation is like a rule for us. It’s very deterministic, and you can match certain specs with certain deliveries. So that has helped in moving things faster.”
The most daunting current challenges, he says, involve content discovery. To address those discovery issues, he says, A+E uses “automation in conjunction with AI to find content that would do well on specific platforms across specific audiences. That’s a big challenge, which we are right now trying to solve by doing scene analysis across all of our content. So it’s content discovery, finding what would play well, content delivery to the individual partners, each with their own unique requirements, and then data analysis, doing some sort of performance analytics basically to further inform us on what to schedule when [and] on which platform.”
“I always use the Cinderella analogy,” Nagle chimes in. “The glass slipper only fits on one foot. If only that were the case with streaming platforms, we’d have an easier day.”
“That day is Monday, actually,” Neralla quips.
Automating and Accelerating FAST to Air at Katapy
Nagle then turns to Katapy's Bishop, noting that their fellow panelists have “a lot” (and potentially a growing number) of channels to contend with and says, “Let’s say I'm a content owner and I come to Katapy and I say, ‘How fast can I get a channel on the air?’ How does that work?”
“Well, I think Abhishek has it exactly right,” Bishop replies, referencing Neralla’s emphasis on using scene analysis to facilitate more effective content discovery. “It’s about understanding the content that's there and actually knowing what that content is. It’s very important when you onboard all the content to identify those scenes because once you've identified the scenes in the content, it might be an hour-long piece of content, but there's four or five key scenes within that content that you know are relevant to the viewer. So you look at that and you look at using that data as you're building out the channel. Katapy onboards thousands of pieces of content per day. It comes in, we manage it, it gets curated. It can be done in batch, it can be done throughout CMS, we can have watch folders, we can do it from anywhere. And we pull that content in, we make it then available.”
Once the content is onboarded, he continues, “it’s all curated into an archive. At that point, programming that out is very fast. It can be completely automated; it can be done manually. You could do a mix of the two. You could choose the primetime slots that you want to do when you think of horizontal programming. Realistically, today, you can put a channel up in absolutely no time. We’ve seen people, depending on the size of the archive, onboard 10,000 or 15,000 pieces of content over a couple of days into the system and have [their] FAST channel up while [the content is] being onboarded. It all happens at the same time, and we've been known to put a fast channel up within a few hours. But with a real channel, realistically, [it takes] a couple of days to put it out there in a way that it's going to work well.”
The Struggle for Standardization
Bishop goes on to address the problem with fragmentation and the lack of standardization across different platforms that Neralla also discussed.
“It would be lovely to have some standardization out there—a hint to all those people that are picking up these channels,” he says. “I don’t think it’s happening, but we do deliver, so I think we syndicate out to 50 or 60 different partners now, and it’s pretty normal to have out of that at least 10 different renditions. That’s pretty crazy.”
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