- The rebrand reflects a shift to three streaming-native business lines
- It leverages pay TV experience to help power FAST channels for others
- CTV advertising is a priority and represents the biggest growth opportunity
- It’s building up targeting and outcomes measurement capabilities with a focus on helping advertisers reach multicultural growth audiences
Independent media company Fuse Media is refocusing its business and operations around streaming and CTV advertising, with an emphasis on multicultural audiences.
The company last month announced a rebrand reflecting its shift to expand from a multicultural traditional TV network operator to a streaming-first business that also serves partners across the FAST and CTV ecosystem.
We sat down virtually with Fuse Media Chief Business Officer Patrick Courtney and Chief Revenue Officer Karl Meyer to get StreamTV Insiders the scoop on the rebrand and related pivot, which organizes the company into three streaming-native business lines, with CTV advertising representing the overarching priority and biggest growth opportunity.
The three streaming-native business lines now include: FAST channel management; FAST and connected TV partner ad supply via its Culture Collective; and a new Content Delivery & Monetization business for AVOD and SVOD library owners.
A disruptive time
Courtney has been with Fuse Media for nearly a decade and in May 2024 was named as the company’s first chief business officer.
Per the CBO, much of his role now is “figuring out how to thread the needle of an independent media company in entertainment these days” and what that looks like in the modern era.
That involves figuring out how to diversify an entertainment company that historically has been in the pay TV business as a traditional cable network operator with its Fuse and FM linear channels. And to build out other areas of distribution, monetization and content in order to find a path to “continue to grow through what is now a pretty disruptive time in media and entertainment,” Courtney said.
Those aims amid the changing state of entertainment underpin how it has pivoted – with efforts starting on streaming back in 2018 when its first FAST channel launched – to three streaming-native business lines and a shift from primarily being a B2C company into a provider to others in the industry, powering a variety of partner FAST networks.
Historical roots helps fuel ad-supported streaming future
A successful shift to streaming isn’t always given, and Fuse Media is a relatively small player competing in a CTV space with some much larger and deep-pocketed media and tech companies.
But Meyer – who joined Fuse Media as CRO in January from Samsung, where he spent nine years including building out the smart TV maker’s FAST and related advertising business – doesn’t view the company’s smaller size and traditional pay TV roots as a hindrance either.
Instead, he sees it as nimbler and able to make changes more quickly than at some other heavily matrixed corporate companies, which, alongside experience in multicultural audiences, helps it to compete.
“We do that with hyper-targeted niche content around diverse audiences, multicultural” Meyer said, including Hispanic, Black and LGBTQ audiences, among others. “In less than five years, we’ll all look up and see that these growth audiences have now surpassed the general market…so I feel like it’s a great opportunity.”
It intends to leverage pay TV experience in building programming and audiences around cultural affinities and use it across the quickly evolving ecosystem.
“For more than 20 years, we've learned how to identify audiences, create programming for them, develop meaningful talent relationships and monetize those connections. The rebrand reflects how we're applying that expertise to the next era of television,” said Mike Roggero, Chairman & CEO at Fuse Media, in a statement.
CTV advertising key priority
Amid the changes in the company’s business focus, enriching and growing the CTV ad business is now a main objective.
CTV advertising has been the fastest growing area of its business “bar none” for the past several years, Courtney said, and where they believe the bigger overall opportunity is.
Advertising in particular is where Meyer comes in, bringing more than 35 years in ad sales experience alongside a self-described passion for media and the know-how to “make a little bit of wine out of water on this stuff.”
Part of the CTV push involves bringing together its targeted content and hard-to-reach multicultural audiences with data and measurement partners to deliver verified incremental reach and outcomes for brands.
Internal company data shows that across its portfolio Fuse Media reaches more than 74 million monthly active viewers and generated nearly 4.9 billion viewing minutes in 2025.
However, as Courtney noted, ad-supported streaming is in a place where viewing performance is outpacing ad demand.
This means some feel challenged by monetization in FAST, but it also presents an opening for the rebranded company to bring its capabilities and expertise to other players in the space.
Pivot to 3 streaming-native business lines
FAST channel management – For this business line, it offers operating infrastructure to take a FAST channel from concept through launch with programming, scheduling, distribution, monetization and scale.
Fuse Media was an early entrant in the FAST space and has seen more recent traction including channel partnerships involving names like Robert Rodriguez, Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias, Kevin Hart, Billboard and Complex
It added four premium channels to its FAST portfolio in the past year, now operating eight in total including Billboard Español TV, Complex TV, El Rey Rebel, Fluffy TV, LOL! Network, OUTflix Movies, Shades of Black and Somos Novelas, alongside its Fuse+ subscription service.
FAST industry is rightsizing but still presents opportunity
The company has already seen success with FAST management, Courtney said, on the back of the ecosystem’s rapid rise.
That said, while creating a FAST channel can be relatively simple, success isn’t necessarily as easy nor guaranteed.
As the space has matured in the U.S. it’s also become more crowded (with thousands of channels available) - making it harder for content owners or channel operators to stand out, attract engagement and successfully monetize.
As such, Courtney suggested some who jumped into FAST are now rethinking going it alone, particularly as advertising demand hasn’t caught up to an oversupply of inventory.
And maturation means FAST platforms themselves are being a bit more selective in the channels they take on, seeking to attract net-new audiences and deepen engagement with existing bases.
Per Courtney, anyone could stand up a FAST channel tomorrow and say they have one.
“But to get that distribution, to get that content, know how to schedule it, to monetize it well…that’s how you actually make a great FAST channel and profitable one,” he said.
Those factors are why the execs believe there is still “quite a bit of opportunity” in providing FAST channel management as a service, even as the FAST industry overall does a bit of rightsizing.
Leveraging the pay TV playbook for FAST
Here it’s leaning on its linear experience in programming and scheduling to help channel partners stand out and perform.
“The FAST playbook looks a lot like the pay TV playbook,” Courtney continued. And when Fuse Media applied it based on decades of operating pay TV networks, “that allowed us to build an operations model for FAST that we just know how to do.”
It’s seen growth for FAST channels it already operates, pointing to evidence of its new model’s momentum.
El Rey Rebel, for example, has recorded 24 consecutive months of year-over-year audience growth, while OUTflix Movies has posted ten consecutive months of triple-digit year-over-year gains. Complex TV, which launched earlier this year, has seen steady monthly double-digit audience growth.
Its reputation and capabilities are why Courtney believes clients like those have come to the company.
Content partners know they can bring their brand and library of content to Fuse Media, he said, which can then fill out the FAST channel with programming it has access to across major studios, alongside scheduling, distribution and monetization capabilities.
This allows Fuse Media to “bring a channel from good to great and to be a channel that has staying power in what is a very competitive environment.”
On the FAST front it’s not looking to add or take on just any channel partners, but rather a curated selection that fits into its multicultural audience approach to programming and ad sales.
But while FAST channel management is a key part of the business, Courtney emphasized it is only one piece of the ecosystem and Fuse Media still participates in other models including AVOD and SVOD.
The focus on CTV advertising, meanwhile, feeds into the company’s second streaming-native business line.
Culture Collective
The second streaming-native business line is Fuse Media’s curated portfolio of diverse-owned CTV and FAST ad supply, where it acts as a sales agent for third-party channels and partners that want help to better monetize inventory.
While some have been challenged by this aspect in FAST, the company has not appeared to have issues.
Courtney said Culture Collective “was born out of the fact that we were oversold across our own and operated FAST channels, and we saw that there were folks, especially those without sales teams, who were struggling to monetize their inventory effectively.”
It doesn’t manage or operate FAST channels of these partners but handles CTV ad sales for several others including Lionsgate, Trusted Media Brands, Tastemade, and Gunpowder Sky – ultimately helping to bring together channels with distinct and diverse audiences for greater scale that many advertisers want or require.
Magnite has designated Fuse Media as the largest diverse-owned CTV ad supply portfolio it tracks.
Content Delivery & Monetization: The third streaming-native business line is a newly launched service for owners of AVOD and SVOD libraries seeking a curated path into CTV distribution. The offering includes guaranteed SVOD placement on Fuse+ and a revenue-sharing model designed to give content owners an alternative to traditional aggregation models.
A shift in go-to-market for advertisers
On the CTV advertising front, the execs noted advertisers increasingly want to reach hard-to-find growth audiences and target them with outcomes-based measurement – and importantly, to do so at scale.
In that sense, the rebrand also reflects a change in how it goes to market to advertisers.
With his purview heading up ad sales, Meyer said the ads business has and will continue to move quickly towards lower-funnel performance. That ties into identifying and attributing audiences for advertisers, who the CRO said are now under pressure to deliver return on ad spend and prove results from CTV investments.
“Long are the days of buying media from a seller because you like them or you have a good time at a lunch or a dinner, and it's really now about performance,” Meyer commented.
From that lens, Fuse Media is working to educate its marketers and ad clients with data and insights into its IP, channels and importantly audience. For the latter it leads with authenticated, unique multicultural viewers that might be hard to reach elsewhere.
So far, it’s had “great success doing that,” he said, while emphasizing the importance of identity-based targeting and outcomes-based measurement to meet advertisers’ growing demand for performance and accountability.
Show me the measurement
But it’s not just a matter of saying they’ve got the audience – claims need to be backed up with data.
On that front it’s been stepping up to partner with established and known data and measurement vendors like iSpot, Nielsen, Comscore, and others, “to really reinforce and prove that we’ve got an audience that’s different and unique.”
iSpot brings particular strength in outcomes-based measurement, per Meyer, who also called out capabilities like identifying incremental reach and audience- or share- shifting as things advertisers are really looking for at the moment.
From proof to activation: Reaching growth audiences at scale
Once an advertiser is on board, the next step is to activate on those targets - which can be done across its digital pool of assets.
That includes via the suite of owned-and-operated FAST channels or across the Culture Collective – the latter which is part of how it delivers for programmatic advertising.
“You need a lot of scale in order to achieve those objectives that advertisers are looking for,” Courtney said. “So if you’re a single FAST channel or if you have a couple of FAST channels, that might be really difficult to be able to get those looks from advertisers directly, they want a bigger slice of things.”
With outcomes in focus, the CRO suggested it can offer targeting that delivers on any KPI an advertiser might have, including foot traffic for retail and QSRs or education for pharma brands, for example.
And there are ways to dig deeper with advanced television, Meyer described, such as sponsorships, weekend blocks or certain marketing stunts around content and context that targets these incremental audiences.
On FAST channels it’s also about activations that go beyond the 30-second spot, where the company is leaning into new and interactive formats, like Pause Ads, L-bars and those offered from the likes of vendors BrightLine, TripleLift and GumGum, for example.
Subscription still a strategic priority with Fuse+
While advertising is a core focus and the main growth driver, the execs told us that its paid subscription streamer Fuse+ remains a strategic priority.
They still see opportunity in subscription and noted the model serves as a differentiated revenue stream that’s insulated from the volatility of the advertising market.
As viewing has shifted from pay TV to ad-free SVODs to an abundance of ad-supported streaming options, the execs expect a swing back towards the middle and believe “subscription is going to find a nice sweet spot,” Courtney said.
And as bundling and re-bundling of subscription services in reseller environments takes shape, he thinks the company has a similar opportunity and position there as it does in FAST.
Tapping into YouTube
Separately, as it seeks to monetize its own content and that of others, it’s also looking to YouTube, which has become its own force on CTV.
Announced last week, Fuse Media signed on as the launch partner of Social Department’s new AI-powered platform ACME, which is designed to continuously monetize entertainment libraries on YouTube.
ACME analyzes a content owner’s library, identifies opportunities, creates clips and Shorts, optimizes thumbnails and metadata, publishes new assets to YouTube and continuously adjusts the strategy.
The effort is new, so results remain to be seen but the company is initially putting approximately 5,500 videos, or about 1,000 hours of programming, into the ACME platform.
All about reaching growth audiences
Fuse Media’s revamped position and work so far in ad-supported streaming and CTV advertising all align with its core strategic mindset of reaching unique growth audiences advertisers want.
“That’s what’s allowed us to not only be successful, but to stay relevant and have a little bit of a moat and some strength in this area of the business when things are starting to get a little more challenging,” Courtney said.