Industry Insights: Navigating the FAST landscape – challenges and opportunities for broadcasters
Live streaming is relatively new to the FAST world, and major technological advancements have had to be created to adapt for live captioning and live translation.
NewscastStudio explores the dynamic landscape of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST), examining key players in the broadcast vendor and supplier sectors in our latest Industry Insights roundtable.
The following quote in NewscastStudio’s feature article is from our Chief Revenue Officer, Josh Pine. For further details, refer to the roundtable discussion within this article.
NewscastStudio: How is the increasing popularity of FAST shaping the streaming landscape? And more specifically your product offerings?
Josh Pine: FAST has changed the streaming landscape by providing a broad wealth of content that is free to the end user. It’s like old traditional antenna TV watching, but with thousands of channels, hundreds of genres, and content quality ranging from Hollywood “tentpole” title content to user generated content, and everything in between. However, all this content needs to be updated for compliance purposes, such as ADA captions, and also needs to be localized for multi-language usage both domestically and internationally.
NewscastStudio: How is the global expansion of FAST services being managed?
Josh Pine: The U.S. has had a multiple year lead on FAST expansion compared to the rest of the world. In some countries U.S. platforms have easily set up shop, but other countries can prove challenging, whether government regulations/restrictions, lack of adequate local technology, legal and licensing issues, etc. But one of the biggest challenges for expanding globally is the ability to localize content quickly, and at cost levels that make sense for lower individual territory ROI’s.
NewscastStudio: What innovations in broadcast technology are being driven by the growth of FAST?
Josh Pine: Live streaming is relatively new to the FAST world, and major technological advancements have had to be created to adapt for live captioning and translation. Standard broadcast has used physical stenography for years, but for FAST it’s too expensive, not accurate enough, and doesn’t keep up fast enough with live sports and events. So we have turned to AI to create on the fly captions, and live translations.
