From quantity to quality: how the European FAST landscape evolves towards maturity

The European FAST market has experienced significant growth in recent years and has reached new heights in the last year. Pluto TV nearly tripled its channel lineup since 2021, while LG Channels and Samsung TV Plus surpassed the milestone of 500 unique active FAST channels across Europe by the end of 2023, compared to 366 and 286 respectively at the beginning of 2022. An exciting space for a multitude of actors, bearing the promise of new revenue streams The number of FAST channels available on European-grown platforms is still significantly smaller than on American players who expanded their rapidly growing operations across the Atlantic. However, European OTT services have tried to mirror the success of the US FAST model in the last couple of years to claim their share of the pie. Their FAST channel line-up has been expanding rapidly, for example Rakuten TV, a historical actor in the transactional video market that pivoted to ad-supported back in 2019, has doubled its FAST channel line-up last year alone. Other European actors evolved their business models towards FAST channels, like Rlaxx TV, waipu.tv, and wedotv in the DACH markets, Molotov in France with Mango in 2020, and Freeview Play in the UK. The other side of the FAST adventure is the opportunity it represents for content rights holders. Even if dominated by the American powerhouse Paramount, the environment is overall more balanced between international and domestic actors than on the distribution side. Content owners on both the production (Paramount, All3Media, Banijay, NBC Universal, Mediawan) and distribution (Rakuten, Filmrise, Plaion) sides have hopped on the FAST train. They emerge as the primary providers of FAST channels, as those offer them the possibility to exploit extensive content libraries in quickly curated channels.  This diverse array of players is driven by the desire to establish a new window for content exploitation and the promise of substantial advertising revenues akin to the US market. As a result, the landscape is currently highly fragmented, with over 1,500 unique FAST channels available on 22 different platforms across European markets at the end of 2023. However, the European FAST market is still far behind the US one The total digital video advertising market in the US weighed 46 billion dollars in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17% until 2028. On the other hand, this market stood at almost 14 billion dollars in 2023 in Europe (excl. Russia & Belarus) with a CAGR of 11% in the same period. This significant gap reflects the differences in maturity of the two regions and the bigger potential in growth represented by the US. This difference is also very much present in the FAST market. It can...