FAST WARS – It is a content play, not a technology play

FAST Wars, the Free Ad-funded Streaming Television race to roll out broadcasters to IP-connected device platforms. Both Content Owners and Broadcasters have seen FAST to be a cost-effective approach to grow and transpose their content or channel revenues from declining cable and satellite platforms to connected TV and FAST OTT Platforms powered by Smart TV Apps and supported across mobile, computer, and tablet devices.

What most channels and platforms have failed to recognize or admit, is that the two main stakeholders are the audience, the viewers, and the advertisers. The viewers watch the content and provide the advertising demand and the advertisers buy the demand to provide a return on the content investments very few technology providers have embraced the views of both key stakeholders which has devalued the offering.

In the FAST Channel Eco-system, Content, Audience, Revenue & Technology the latter has been the main FAST WARS play but is in fact very low down the pecking order in terms of FAST success apart from the curation and presentation of the content and is most certainly a fraction of the CAPEX and OPEX spend within a broadcaster.

FAST Channels owners receiving less than 20% of gross revenues due to the desperation to be everywhere for little outlay has made the revenue-share stack unsustainable for high-value content owners and creators with higher spending requirements and overheads.

The future of FAST has to entice existing high-value content owners and existing broadcasters to sustainably transform their business from existing contribution methods to FAST or Subscription Broadcast services with a fair revenue-share and costs model to justify the substantially higher content costs of the looping archive channels of FAST innovators who are not commissioning or producing content.

The future of FAST channels, FAST viewers, and FAST advertisers is FAST First Content and events which generate comparative revenues to sustain and grow traditional broadcasters with accurate audience statistics and a fair market share across platforms.

The Future of FAST is technology agnostic just like the DotCom boom of two decades ago, the professionals adopting and adding credibility with a mature and sustainable business model.

Kapang has modelled the future of FAST and the Future of Television to provide content creators with a sustainable business model to produce FAST-First content to entice the mass audiences to adopt FAST and Connected TV as their “Telly Replacement”.

Kapang has business modelled the transformation of existing TV Broadcasters including Local TV and Hyper-local TV broadcasters to enable them to adopt the service as another contribution with comparative revenues providing a simple and sustainable staged transformation.

Kapang with a fair 80/20 business model is pioneering FAST and Streaming Media by delivering a carrier-grade contribution to existing broadcasters to provide a sustainable future to broadcasting with minimal change via the BroadcastCDN technology stack.