The free shows hiding in your TV

Welcome to FAST: the free, ad-supported, streaming television bargain bin. The Wild West of streaming TV is here and it’s free I was looking for Night Court, for [research purposes](. Not the new version; the original, which went off the air in 1992. Much to my surprise, I found all nine seasons on a streaming app that I’d never heard of before, and that I didn’t have to pay for, called Freevee. The catch? I just had to watch a few ads. A free streaming service? In this subscription economy? What is this magic? I dove into my TV’s app listings and discovered a cornucopia of similar offerings, with strange names like Tubi, Pluto, and Xumo. If they don’t sound familiar, you’ll recognize their owners: [Fox](, [Paramount](, and [Comcast](, respectively. Freevee is owned by Amazon. Even my TV has its own free streaming app, Samsung TV Plus. Content can vary, but the format is pretty standard: They offer hundreds of linear live channels and on-demand libraries of thousands of hours of TV shows and movies. The content ranges from old and obscure to recent reruns and castoffs. You might see a few original shows in there, too. And maybe a few [your]( [friends]( recommended. These are free, ad-supported, streaming TV — also known as FAST — services. They’re kind of having a moment. Viewers are finding them as they look for alternatives to costly cable and premium streaming subscriptions. Studios, cable companies, and streaming device manufacturers are turning to them as they look for ways to grab new eyeballs and ad dollars, wring more money out of their archives, and promote their other paid services and products. If you’ve only known a world of paying for subscriptions (or using your parents’ password) to watch streaming movies and TV shows, FAST might seem like a novel idea. If you’re older, it probably looks like an updated digital version of an old friend called basic cable. FAST is a throwback to television before Netflix. It may also be a big part of its future, according to Alan Wolk, media analyst and co-founder of TVREV. “Once Netflix and Disney and all of them get their ad product up and running,” Wolk said, “the big advertisers who've been hesitant to spend money on streaming because it's still mostly reruns are going to go, ‘Oh, I get it. Netflix, that's the new primetime, FAST is the new cable. This is how I'll spend the money.’” Wolk knows the world of FAST pretty well because he’s the one who came up with the term around the end of 2018. It was a way to distinguish completely free streaming services with paid streamers that had a cheaper ad tier. This is also around the time when FAST started to take off, with major media companies and device manufacturers buying them up or starting their own. They often rely on third parties to fill up their libraries and channels, which resemble what you’ll find on traditional television. Some have their own original or exclusive content. You’ll also, of course, find those unskippable ads plopped in the middle of it. These companies aren’t providing FAST services and content out of the goodness of their hearts. For something like Paramount, which [bought Pluto]( for $340 million in January 2019, FAST is a way to reach whoever isn’t watching Paramount’s broadcast and cable channels and doesn’t want to pay for its premium streaming service, Paramount+. It’s also a way to monetize its voluminous archives of television and movies, and give free users a taste of what they can get on Paramount+. “Our ecosystems complement each other,” Scott Reich, senior vice president of programming at Pluto, said. While Paramount+ has the new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, Pluto’s got the previous season and the first episode of the new one. “We're helping upsell over to Paramount+ to see the new season,” Reich said. “You can use Pluto TV as a way of catching up and previewing. And then you go behind the paywall on Paramount+ to continue.” Or maybe you’re Fox, which doesn’t have a paid streaming service (aside from Fox Nation, which is a niche product) to lose billions of dollars a year on. So it can put a little piece of money into Tubi, which it does. Those investments have helped Tubi amass the largest library of all the FAST services, and they’ve helped it make big gains in viewership and ad revenue. Fox bought Tubi for [$440 million]( in March 2020. It [reportedly]( turned down offers of up to $2 billion three years later, and Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch [recently said]( its performance has been “nothing short of stellar.” “We make money when people consume content, so deep engagement is really the key,” said Adam Lewinson, Tubi’s chief content officer. “In this world we live in these days, where everyone is down their own rabbit hole, if I made a judgment call that everyone is going to watch this one piece of content, it's a very risky bet. As opposed to saying well, across 50,000 titles, we truly have something for everyone. And, frankly, a lot of it.” For a device manufacturer like Roku, FAST is a way to monetize the exclusive access it has to users. It can put its own Roku Channel front and center on users’ menus, and it can use the [data it collects]( on what they watch to target ads to them. Yes, your TV is spying on you, unless you’ve [opted out]( of being watched while you’re watching. That’s why Roku is happy to offer the Roku Channel to non-Roku users too. Like most of these services, Roku Channel is available as a standalone app and on the internet. You don’t have to own a Roku or even a television. And if you’re a third-party provider, FAST offers another way to distribute and make money off of your content. Some companies try to get their shows on as many platforms as possible, which is why you can find 24/7 channels of Forensic Files reruns on seemingly every FAST service. Or they may do exclusive deals or partnerships with FAST services, like Samsung TV Plus’s [new]( Conan O’Brien TV, Freevee’s [Washington Post Television](, or Roku’s [Mythical 24/7](. If you can make money off of mostly repackaged content or episodes of [Topper](, a show that peaked at 24 in the Nielsen ratings in 1954, well, why not? FAST channels typically have [revenue-sharing deals]( with distributors, in which case they’re both getting paid based on how many ads are served. Sometimes that’s a good deal, [sometimes it’s not](. But the FAST service isn’t taking a risk either way. “They make money on them together, and only if people are watching,” David Offenberg, a finance professor at Loyola Marymount University said. “If nobody watches the show, no ads get served, then nobody makes any money. And it doesn't cost anybody. ... The economics are vastly different than all the subscription services.” If they’re owned by a company with its own archives, like Pluto and its Paramount library, then that’s an easy enough source. Or they may have licensing agreements, where they just pay a set fee for access to the content. The platforms won’t tell you exactly how their various deals are structured, but Tubi’s Lewinson told Vox that the platform has more than 450 content partners, from major studios on down to tiny independent distributors, and that the industry in general has “all different kinds of business models.” “It’s very Wild West still,” Wolk said. 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