One of our latest Amagi AIRTIME webinars featured Billboard's Dana Droppo, Sports Studio Inc.'s Cathy Rasenberger, and Amagi's Siva Natarajan. They discussed how live programming has become a crucial part of the streaming ecosystem.
Read on for highlights from the discussion.
What types of sports and live event tiers do you offer, what percentage is live content, and how has your journey been so far in FAST as a young company?
Cathy Rasenberger: "Our goal was to be the destination for all passionate fans for every category of sport around the world, and I think when we launched with 120 channels, we covered every category with some content. We have 5 or 6 motorsports channels, multiple fight channels, racket sports, and horse racing—literally not a category we don't cover. When live events air, we see significant upticks in viewership and watch time, and that often sustains for weeks after."
Was Women in Music your first event on FAST, and what was your overall strategy for taking it to the platform?
Dana Droppo: "Billboard is 120 years old, so we've had many IPs that lived on broadcast. Digital became our major consumption driver in the last 15 years. Taking Women in Music to FAST was a natural next step. It was our first major FAST project, and it fits our core strategy of distributing IP across multiple platforms to reach the most engaged audience."
READ: How to promote a FAST channel: Top strategies
Is it a pure revenue play, the FAST strategy, or is it brand building, or is it about introducing new artists and franchises? How do you look at it in terms of monetization?
Dana Droppo: "Fundamentally, anything that we do should achieve multiple KPIs for us. So revenue is important, increasing our audience is important, and, you know, we're really excited about the entrance of live sports to FAST because right now, music availability in FAST programming is, it's audio-dominant, and for the most part, it's a passive listener. Who's putting on the channel, who's cleaning their home, who's driving to work, who's, you know, whatever the behavior is for them, it's passive. And live sports audiences are a much more active and engaged audience.
So, Billboard is early in the entrance to FAST with music content that is exciting, news-based, and original interviews with the biggest stars in the world. This is the only channel you can watch on FAST right now. You can sit down and watch Bad Bunny, Gracie Abrams, and Charli XCX do interviews and showcase live performances.
We really want to ensure that we understand where the engaged audience is living and where they're moving to so that we can be a first mover in that space. At this moment, there really is not a competitor within music that's creating content for an audience that wants to learn about and discover music, and particularly as these providers become increasingly global, that's really important for us.
In the last 3 years, when you look at the Hot 100, the singles chart, you can see a massive uptick in non-English language songs that are charting, and that's unprecedented. We've never seen that before."
READ: Top predictions for upcoming streaming trends
What are the top three innovations you want to see in FAST that will further your business, increase viewership, or bring more advertisers into the ecosystem?
Cathy Rasenberger: “Yeah, I have a lot on my wish list, but I'll just mention a few. So, first of all, I think discovery is a major issue for all of us. We are looking at creating an AI tool that will personalize our EPG for our viewers. We've worked with Argoid, which was acquired by Amagi. The second thing that I think is exciting and critical is a capability that creates and plugs in SDK into your mobile apps using short-form videos that enable social interaction, interactivity, help with content discovery in sports, it's fantastic because you can do leaderboards, rewards, share sports data for betting, and, in the end, if you don't have a short form strategy, you're in a tough position in the future since younger viewers are only interested in watching short content, but I think a user-generated, like TikTok type experience that you can layer in on top of your long-form video apps.
I think shoppability is going to grow, and many companies have tested different types of shopping, you know, solutions. Nobody's cracked the code entirely, but I think this is the year that there will be real, real movement in onscreen shopping on CTV.”
Watch the full webinar here.
Want to learn more?
- Read our whitepaper on how FAST channels complement an on-demand strategy here
- Read our latest Global FAST Report here
- View our full webinar series here
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