Why FAST Is Growing Slower Outside the U.S.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Nick Colsey: As you go to some of these other markets around the world, the advertisers and the ad agencies are still kind of catching up on what CTV can do. I think the the challenge, which I'm sure Stefan and Olivia can talk about much better than I can, is as you enter a new market outside of the U.S., finding those tech-savvy and CTV-savvy advertisers and ad agencies is a potential barrier. I think that they can't ignore the success that FAST has had globally, but maybe they don't yet have the ability to to capitalize on it.

Stefan Van Engen: I think that's right. We're in the early stages of this across Europe. And the U.S. Is very large, and advertisers go where the eyeballs are. When you start going territory by territory, it can become a very small market very quickly, but as more players, as Pluto continues to grow in those areas, as the OEMs continue to grow their FAST services in those areas, it becomes more scale. It moves more of the agencies. It moves more of the eyeballs because they're gonna follow the scale. You know, and XUMO today as a brand name, isn't necessarily wide across Europe. We're more of a supportive role for people like LG channels or Rakuten's AVOD service, or Samsung TV plus. But it's similar in that you need that scale to draw the advertisers, and when you're trying to localize content localize and add experience, sometimes the scale is lagging a little bit behind for the advertisers.

Paul Brickel: We're certainly seeing adoption grow globally. EMEA and APAC and LatAm are really picking it up for us. The ad fill, the demand side isn't quite what we're seeing in the U.S. But I think it also wasn't that long ago we were talking about FAST and talking about issues with frequency and ad fill and timeouts. And I don't hear that quite as much as I used to. So I think there is a lag globally, but with the way content is being brought into FAST channels and even AVOD, I think we'll see that shift. I imagine we'll see LatAm and APAC and EMEA, but there's so much potential in those regions and there's so much content that is so specific to those regions that we'll see adoption there as well.

So I think now, ideally that works itself out. The, the other things that Nick touched on earlier was around payment as being a barrier to subscription services in, in LATAM specifically. And so as we see veers Grif drift towards LA or a OD and FAST services what, what I guess I get concerned about in, in regions like that is the fragmentation of devices and TV manufacturers and you know, how much that fractures the, the landscape for us. I, I don't know if I have an answer for that, but I'd be curious to get others take on it. But that was one of the, always one of our concerns in building apps, OTT apps in those emerge regions in the past, was there so much fragmentation across devices and the way viewers consume information.

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