Ready to hear more insights from TVREV’s Alan Wolk? Don’t miss out on the TVREV Pre-Game Workshop: The Future of Streamonomics at The StreamTV Show in Denver on June 11. Check out the lineup and register here to be in the know on the latest and what’s up next across FAST, local TV, TVOS, and contextual advertising.
1. FASTs Need A Reset
It’s been well over 10 years since the guys at Pluto and Tubi came up with the idea of free ad-supported streaming television, close to seven years since some guy in New Jersey realized that spelled out “FAST” and gave it a name.
But the segment, once the hottest thing in television, is at a crossroads these days as consumers struggle with discovery and publishers struggle with unfilled inventory.
That’s more a sign of a maturing industry that needs some shaking up and paring down, rather than a category that is in its death throes, but it’s well worth looking at what is going on with FAST and why it needs some TLC.
Why It Matters
Amazon and Hulu aside, ad-supported SVOD is still struggling to gain traction, at least in the US. That means the bulk of the inventory on streaming is still on various FAST services.
This is notable in that the vast majority of ads viewed in the US are still on linear.
This is not as insane as it sounds: almost all linear is ad-supported, only around half of all streaming is. And ad breaks on linear are much, much longer than on streaming.
Hence the imbalance.
There are a number of issues that FASTs—and the people who love them—need to figure out.
What Are They: There is much confusion as to what “FAST” actually refers to. There are the services themselves—the aggregators who control the interface and are responsible for curating all the programming. So everyone from Pluto and Tubi to The Roku Channel, LG Channels, Samsung TV Plus and VIZIO WatchFree+.
Then there are what people have taken to calling “FAST Channels”—all the linear channels on those FAST services.
Which now also have lots of on-demand options—Tubi in particular, where 90% of what’s watched is on-demand.
Meaning it’s often hard to understand what people are referring to when they talk about “FAST.”
Where Are They: While consumers don’t really use terms like FAST, they’re aware that there are free ad-supported services and channels and on demand and that there is little consistency between any of them which makes discovery difficult, re-discovery almost impossible. (“Re-discovery” = “I was watching this great channel with Welcome Back, Kotter reruns on it, but when I went to tell my friend, I couldn’t figure out where it was.”)
Low Fill Rates: We hear about this problem a lot—that so much CTV inventory—FAST in particular—goes unfilled, and it’s because there are a whole lot of FAST channels and FAST on-demand libraries that get about two viewers a week and thus have almost no advertisers and others that get tens of thousands and plenty of advertisers and despite the very low CPMs on the former, many are not attracting advertisers because there is way more low grade volume than people looking for low-grade volume.
Lack of Transparency: This hits both advertisers and publishers. The advertisers have no idea where their ads ran other than (maybe) “on a crime drama last week” while publishers (the people who own the content) have little to no visibility as to how many people are watching their shows, where they come from, which shows are most popular. For both parties, the lack of transparency makes it hard to know what’s working in a way that just breeds discouragement and distrust.
Uncertainty: A big theme this year for sure, but there’s a sense that the FAST services are going to continue to cull underperforming programming, that ad rates will continue to fluctuate and that no one will really fully understand why, because the people who might provide the answers have no interest in providing them.
Europe: As you have no doubt gleaned from our Marconi newsletter, FAST is a different beast in Europe. Mostly because there are a number of public broadcasters who can offer free streaming content, meaning the demand for free content is much different than it is in America, free ad-supported content in particular.
What You Need To Do About It
The solution, at least to this Jerseyite, would seem to lie with two seemingly diametrically opposing concepts: standardization and personalization.
Allow me to explain.
Standardization would mean that the major FAST services all had a core group of linear channels and on-demand libraries that were the same from service to service. This would then allow advertisers to buy categories across all of the main services creating something like economies of scale while also offering the sort of reach that advertisers love about TV.
It would, conceivably lead to greater transparency as the need for each platform to be less than open about their particular stats would not be as great.
At the same time, personalization would allow for the creation of something like Spotify’s Daily Mix playlists, only for TV, which could be organized by category and would mean those Welcome Back, Kotter episodes would never get lost again. (That this is something I predicted would happen in my book, Over The Top: How The Internet Is Slowly But Surely Changing The Television Industry back in 2015, plays no small part in this suggestion. I still think it’s a great idea.)
Personalized channels/playlists would also be great for advertisers who could target viewers with Instagram-like precision, a boon for the small and medium businesses who will soon be making greater use of CTV and FAST.
They are, as noted, diametrically opposed ideas, but more standardization would help advertisers while more personalization would help everyone by making TV feel more like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, while also opening up ad opportunities, shoppable ones in particular.
That is what’s going on with FASTs in a nutshell—we will be doing deeper dives over the course of the year, including an updated special report.
Watch for it.
2. Google Rolls Out AI Agents
If you really want to sound like you know what you’re talking about in terms of AI, make sure you drop the term “agents” a lot.
They’re a big deal these days—everyone and their brother seems to be working on a startup that involves AI “agents” to do a wide array of tasks.
Agents, for the uninitiated, are like mini-ChatGPTs that are trained in one particular task or subject matter. So a travel AI agent might be really good at booking you a hotel, while another one would be the master (or mistress, depending on the level of anthropomorphization you ascribe to them) of booking flights and they would work in tandem within a larger travel application.
Which is why it is notable that Google is introducing AI Agents for their digital ads.
Why It Matters
If nothing else, there will be scores of agency types who will delight in explaining AI agents to their less enlightened peers. The thought of that scenario brings me much joy, in the way a well-written SNL skit does.
But I digress.
Generative AI, circa June 2025, is really good at doing things it would take thousands of humans thousands of hours to do in a way that would be prohibitively cost ineffective.
So, in this instance, Google will use its agents to optimize keywords and SEO terms, suggest tweaks to targeting based on the state of the market and lots of other tasks that a personal Google Ads coach would do if one had a personal Google Ads coach.
That’s going to be super helpful to anyone who regularly advertises on Google but isn’t very good at optimizing the platform.
It’s also a test case: how well will the little agents work? Will they do what they are supposed to do all of the time? Or will they act like GPTs in the wild, hallucinating keywords when you least expect it, with much less frequency than last year, but clearly not never either.
Something to think about.
The thing with AI is that, despite all the hyperbole emanating from certain segments of the tech world, it is still very much in its Compuserve 1994 days. Meaning that we can see all the cool stuff it will be able to do one day, but if you want the score to the Mets game, it’s going to be faster to go down to the newsstand and buy a paper.
Which is no reason to slough off Google’s experiment.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are in the industry, it’s worth playing around with Google’s tools—and everyone else’s—it’s just a matter of time before other tech companies roll out their version of this.
Just make sure you know how to override them.
Understanding how AI works and what it can eventually do is going to be the key to the future.
With the understanding that very little of what the internet is now was even remotely predictable back in 1994.
Rather, it was the people who were immersed in it all along who had the easiest time adjusting to the changes and understanding what was possible.
And that is really all you need to do at this point: stay on top of the changes without going all in on them, remain skeptical but open, always be aware of what is next.
In a world that is changing as rapidly as ours is, it’s pretty much the only path that makes sense.
Ready to hear more insights from TVREV’s Alan Wolk? Don’t miss out on the TVREV Pre-Game Workshop: The Future of Streamonomics at The StreamTV Show in Denver on June 11. Check out the lineup and register here to be in the know on the latest and what’s up next across FAST, local TV, TVOS, and contextual advertising.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.