Amy Kuessner, the ViacomCBS senior vice president who oversees Pluto TV, proclaims FAST TV as “cable 2.0.”
“It’s easy. It’s seamless. It’s lean back,” she said. “We like to offer something for everyone and you just stumble upon content that maybe you’ve never seen before or maybe it brings you back to a day ten years ago.”
Kuessner was part of the panel of television executives who dove into the benefits, evolution and future of FAST TV in the Variety Streaming Room presented by Amagi with editor Todd Spangler. They were joined by Cinedign president and chief strategy officer Eick Opeka; Amagi co-founder Srini; Roku Channel’s director of content acquisition, Jennifer Vaux and Mark Garner, the executive vice president of content licensing and business development at A+E Networks.
“I do think [FAST TV] has graduated over the last few years from that experimentation of let’s string together whatever assets we have available and try it out to… we take this approach exactly as if these were fully distributed cable networks,” Opeka added.
As FAST TV continues to grow, the affiliated services will likely start offering original, exclusive content more and more. For example, Kuessner dove into Pluto’s deal with the Professional Bull Riders Association to be the exclusive streaming home of the PBR Ride Pass.
“Part of PBR joining forces with us is they saw the opportunity to develop a free product and platform because they believe that would be more attuned to their audience,” Kuessner explained. “It’s awareness, reach, sponsorship opportunity and hey, we’re going to be a billion-dollar business this year… There’s a massive revenue opportunity.”
Content is just one place for expansion. As Pluto has already, the FAST services are next looking to tackle the international space.
“It’s one of the growth frontiers for us,” Garner said. “International’s not one big territory. It is a conglomeration of a number of different things. Languages and cultures and tastes, so we will be very specific and surgical about how we go into each one of those different territories and those different markets.”
Watch the full conversation above.
