In Europe, Free Ad-Supported (FAST) “pure-players” grew revenues by a third in the last twelve months, cumulating €630 million. This momentum comes in spite of Freevee’s phase-out towards the end of last year, which transferred one of the top 10 FAST players to Prime Video’s mostly paid environment. Connected TVs (CTVs) services Samsung TV Plus and LG Channels are by far the biggest contributors to this growth. They each generated up than €15M more than in Q3 2024, capturing 71% of the added revenues. Fox’s Tubi and Paramount’s Pluto TV come respectively third and fourth, combining to a much smaller share of the growth. Pluto TV has historically dominated the FAST offering, but has been faced with growing competition and levelling off usage. Samsung TV Plus ended up overthrowing Pluto TV this quarter, to become the highest-grossing FAST platform in Europe. Despite a sustained double-digit growth rate, FAST remains a niche market, accounting for 2 to 3% of the Advertising OTT market. This medium has had difficulty increasing its market share, as Social media (Instagram, TikTok…) and ad-supported subscription platforms (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+...) are growing more in absolute terms. To keep expanding, FAST will have to not only rely on the Top players’ increasing reach but also tap into new customers. For now, 3/4 of the platforms generate together just above 1/4 of the revenues. This trend is not reversing: last quarter, the remaining 12 platforms only contributed 14% to the year-on-year growth. Such momentum should come from more recent CTV entrants, as more of their hardware hits the market. This expands from global Chinese manufacturer TCL, to European-focused OS TiVo+ and TitanOS.
