FAST Festival 2025 Recap
AUGUST 2025
WORLD VIEW By
Mansha Daswani.
PLUTO TV’S OLIVIER JOLLET Olivier Jollet opened the third edition of the FAST Festival, discussing how Pluto TV is curating its stable of FAST channels, trends in AVOD and the importance of partnerships as the platform has scaled its global footprint.
ALL3MEDIA INTERNATIONAL’S FAST TRACK All3Media International’s Gary Woolf, executive VP of strategic development, and Amanda Stevens, senior VP of global digital partnerships, showcased the distributor’s digital strategy.
RAKUTEN TV’S MARCOS MILANEZ Marcos Milanez, chief content officer at Rakuten TV, showcased the platform’s programming strategy across FAST, on-demand and TVOD.
BBC STUDIOS GOES FAST As part of our strand on how leading content powerhouses are approaching the FAST space, FAST Festival viewers heard from Kasia Jablonska, director of digital and on-demand for EMEA at BBC Studios.
RADIAL ENTERTAINMENT’S GARSON FOOS On the heels of Shout! Studios’ merger with FilmRise, Garson Foos, CEO of Radial Entertainment, weighed in on digital distribution opportunities for the combined independent outfit.
LIGHTNING INTERNATIONAL’S JAMES ROSS James Ross, CEO of Lightning International, joined the FAST Festival to discuss the company’s curated slate of broadcast-quality channels intended for broad audience reach, the importance of localization and emerging opportunities in the Asia Pacific.
INDIE PRODUCER PERSPECTIVE Brian Volk-Weiss, CEO of The Nacelle Company, shared with FAST Festival viewers how his indie has developed a multiplatform ecosystem for its content, including rolling out the popular Comedy Dynamics FAST channel curated from its library of stand-up performances.
POCKET.WATCH’S ALBIE HECHT Albie Hecht, chief content officer at pocket.watch, spoke at the FAST Festival about how the company has extended its creator economy franchise-building flywheel to the FAST space.
INDIE PLATFORM PERSPECTIVE Chris Sharp, co-CEO of Video Solutions, operator of the wedotv AVOD platform, joined the FAST Festival to discuss FAST channel curation.
SPEAKING SPANISH: THE U.S. HISPANIC OPPORTUNITY Karsten Amlie, senior VP of content distribution and general counsel at Canela Media, showcased trends in FAST usage among Spanish-language audiences in the U.S.
TRENDING ON The most-viewed clips on our video portals for the last 30 days.
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BY MANSHA DASWANI
FAST’s Next Wave
The crucial need for partnerships and the importance of curation, data, new revenue models and tackling the discovery conundrum were recurring themes at our third annual FAST Festival, which you’ll find recapped in this edition.
We kicked things off with an opening keynote from Olivier Jollet, who heads up international at Paramount’s global AVOD platform, Pluto TV. Pluto TV launched in the U.S. 11 years ago as an early pioneer in the FAST space and has scaled its presence to some 35-plus territories across four continents. Paramount’s acquisition of the platform in 2019 “was a game changer,” Jollet said, but having a local approach in each of its key markets has been critical. Rakuten TV has also been prioritizing a country-by-country approach in Europe as it looks to scale its presence in key markets. Localization was also a key theme of our keynote conversation with James Ross, CEO of Lightning International, which is using AI to subtitle its broadcast-quality services as it expands them across Europe and the Asia Pacific.
Day two of the festival focused on IP owners and how they are approaching the FAST segment, including sessions on All3Media International, BBC Studios and Radial Entertainment, along with a kids’ track with pocket.watch’s Albie Hecht.
Curation was the major theme of our final day of the FAST Festival, delivering intelligence on wedotv, The Nacelle Company’s Comedy Dynamics and U.S. Hispanic media group Canela Media.
Pluto TV’s OLIVIER JOLLET
Olivier Jollet opened the third edition of the FAST Festival, discussing how Pluto TV is curating its stable of FAST channels, trends in AVOD and the importance of partnerships as the platform has scaled its global footprint.
JOLLET
We promise our users simple access to content. The primary mission of Pluto TV was solving the paradox of choice. If you add a lot of on-demand content, you can re-create the paradox of choice. So, we’ve been working with our designers to build the best UX possible and a world where live TV and on-demand are communicating.... It’s all about content discovery. That’s why FAST has become so popular. We are taking the burden of choosing for the users. Tune in and let us do the programming for you. But that’s not sufficient in the world we live in today. We need to go beyond that because we have ondemand. That’s where AI will play a fantastic role in helping content discovery.”
All3Media International’s FAST TRACK
All3Media International’s Gary Woolf, executive VP of strategic development, and Amanda Stevens, senior VP of global digital partnerships, showcased the distributor’s digital strategy.
Operating genre channels allows us to build a FAST home for shows that are specific to our library. It allows us to create opportunities for shows that don’t have enough hours for a single-IP channel but are still amazing viewing. As those channels grow, we can also seed them to build them into single IPs over time. And it gives us flexibility on when we launch content. Flexibility always drives more revenue for filmmakers.”
—Gary Woolf
Margins can be quite tight on FAST channels. We have traditionally worked on a revenue-share basis with platforms, so they represent 100 percent of inventory and revenue share back to us. We’ve started to work with Little Dot, our sister company, to try to sell any unsold inventory.”
—Amanda Stevens
Rakuten TV’s
MARCOS MILANEZ
Marcos Milanez, chief content officer at Rakuten TV, showcased the platform’s programming strategy across FAST, on-demand and TVOD at the FAST Festival.
MILANEZ
FAST has become a critical pillar in our business. We’ve established good landmarks within our FAST lineups across our key markets in Europe. Now, it comes down to advancing in terms of the localization of that lineup and making sure that we have relevant channels with recognizable IPs for each of those local audiences. Particularly in the key Western European and Nordic markets, it comes down to strengthening relationships with broadcasters and local rights holders, making sure that we either acquire thirdparty channels or content from these companies, which we can then feed into our O&O channels.”
BBC STUDIOS GOES FAST
As part of our strand on how leading content powerhouses are approaching the FAST space, FAST Festival viewers heard from Kasia Jablonska, director of digital and on-demand for EMEA at BBC Studios.
Data is extremely important to us. We are not able to scale our digital proposition unless it is data-driven. We launched our own platform where we bring in all the third-party data we have access to. We are sifting through, trying to figure out what is the most relevant and how we can use it. That’s been a major exercise. We now have dashboards. We’ve agreed on the key KPIs. We have benchmarks for our performance. We are able to react quickly if we see any dips in performance, respond to it in real time, readjust scheduling strategy and ensure the performance remains at a certain level.”
Radial Entertainment’s
GARSON FOOS
On the heels of Shout! Studios’ merger with FilmRise, Garson Foos, CEO of Radial Entertainment, weighed in on digital distribution opportunities for the combined independent outfit.
FOOS
The AVOD business allowed companies like ours that have deep libraries to be able to monetize them with so many outlets. We feel like we’re in a great position in the business and see no reason why it won’t keep growing. Internationally, the surface is just being scratched in terms of the AVOD and FAST businesses. We see huge opportunity. There aren’t companies out there with libraries like we have that emphasize the streaming business as we do. That gives us quite a strategic advantage. ”
Lightning International’s
JAMES ROSS
James Ross, CEO of Lightning International, joined the FAST Festival to discuss the company’s curated slate of broadcast-quality channels intended for broad audience reach, the importance of localization and emerging opportunities in the Asia Pacific.
Our business has always been about how we get content onto multiple platforms. We tend to make sure we have all rights. We need to maximize those rights. A move to FAST was a natural one. We’re very familiar with producing broadcast channels. We felt we could produce light versions of the pay channels that we were already producing, but at broadcast-quality standards. FAST is not about just getting a bunch of tapes and playing them back to back. It has to look like a TV channel. Consumers are expecting that any channel they see on their TV looks like the highquality standards they would expect from a terrestrial channel.”
INDIE PRODUCER PERSPECTIVE
Brian Volk-Weiss, CEO of The Nacelle Company, shared with FAST Festival viewers how his indie has developed a multiplatform ecosystem for its content, including rolling out the popular Comedy Dynamics FAST channel curated from its library of stand-up performances.
We don’t tell the audience what should make them laugh. We look at the data, and then we do two things. One, we see what they like. We get data every day, every week, every month, every quarter, depending on the partner. We just go with who’s doing great. It’s that simple. That’s about 67 percent of the curation. The other piece is that we hope we have earned the audience’s trust. So, we give them what they want, and that’s a huge percentage of it, but then we also give them [content] we think they might like to try and get them as new fans.”
Pocket.watch’s
ALBIE HECHT
Albie Hecht, chief content officer at pocket.watch, spoke at the FAST Festival about how the company has extended its creator economy franchise-building flywheel to the FAST space.
We have 59 creators, 1.3 billion subscribers, 10 billion views a month, 30,000 hours of programming. That is our base to build these channels. We have original programming that we get through a unique syndicated model, which are creator originals, and mishmashes, halfhour television shows that are curated from this vast library of YouTube content. They’re curated in a way that’s themed and has original content added so it feels and looks like a television show, which is perfect for linear. It’s also parent-friendly.”
INDIE PLATFORM
PERSPECTIVE
Chris Sharp, co-CEO of Video Solutions, operator of the wedotv AVOD platform, joined the FAST Festival to discuss FAST channel curation.
There’s a demand for our style of curation. We never wanted to approach it from a playlist point of view. Historically, you had one feed that went across lots of countries. Now you’ve got multiple devices, multiple affiliates, but you still have to deliver that quality service to them, and that’s one of the bigger challenges…. This business is driven by advertising, so the more you [have titles] you know you can promote, you know you can get your affiliates to promote, then certainly audiences will come. We program like a traditional TV broadcaster.”
THE U.S. HISPANIC OPPORTUNITY
Karsten Amlie, senior VP of content distribution and general counsel at Canela Media, showcased trends in FAST usage among Spanishlanguage audiences in the U.S.
OPPORTUNITY
There are over 40 million Spanish speakers in the U.S., and that’s not including the bilingual [audience]. Our focus is on the content we provide to the audience we know, and getting them to come back to Canela.TV again and again. Our content team really knows the audience…. We plan to launch new channels targeting underserved audiences within the U.S. Hispanic market. We’re all getting better at using technology to deliver a better product to the consumer. At the same time, at the end of the day, the authenticity is what the consumer realizes when they come to Canela.”
Trending On
The most-viewed clips on our video portals in the last month.
Into the Universe
The series explores the mysteries of the cosmos, from the birth of spiral galaxies to the deaths of massive stars. (ZDF Studios)
Mudtown
Bubblegem
Princess Purple and her mermaid friends must recover magical gems while navigating human life and protecting both worlds in a tale of courage and friendship. (CAKE)
Experienced magistrate Claire Lewis Jones faces personal turmoil when her maternal instincts clash with her commitment to uphold the law. (All3Media International)
REA(L)OVE
A Japanese reality show that brings together 20 contestants seeking romance in an idyllic beach setting, guided by host celebrities. (Global Agency)
Action Hollywood Movies
The channel is dedicated to fast-paced, classic Hollywood action movies featuring big stars, including Bruce Lee. (Lightning International)
