Advertisers aren’t moving to streaming TV quickly

A fourth buyer said that although streaming continues to grow, it isn’t a replacement for primetime on linear. While all of their clients upped their streaming investments, they said adding streaming to deals helped strike a better price for competitive linear assets such as live sports and news, particularly as the Hollywood strikes have largely pulled scripted series out of networks’ fall schedules.

“In this marketplace, the deals were cut in a really great way if you added more streaming than you had last year,” said the fourth buyer. “Volume was the name of the game no matter what, but the more streaming you have, the better deals you’re going to cut, and by deals I mean rollbacks. That definitely is an initiator for some people who have not necessarily pushed towards streaming.”

A fifth buyer said the streaming ecosystem is still too fragmented to fully take advantage of its large audience. Comscore’s research found that the average household now streams on six different services, including free ad-supported platforms.

“What’s the amount of subscriptions that a person is willing to pay for?” said the fifth buyer. “In my opinion, Netflix is one of them. While they’re close to 2 million AVOD subscribers in the U.S., they’re generally paid for as an ad-free experience. What’s going to be on top of it? That’s where the war has to be won.”

Growing FAST

The fourth buyer said free ad-supported streaming, or FAST, is a particular point of interest among clients’ media mixes. Comscore’s data found audiences on the Roku channel and Paramount’s Pluto TV grew 27% and 28%, respectively, over the past 15 months, while Fox’s Tubi audience grew 48% and Amazon’s FreeVee saw its audience jump 55% over the same period. FAST also presents an opportunity to reach diverse audiences, according to Comscore, as Hispanic audiences were found to consume twice as much FAST content, up 81% year-over-year.

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“Investing in FAST channels is a better bet … it’s all licensed content, and people just want to see more of what they like,” said the fourth buyer. “And if they can do it for free, that’s good. [FAST] gives us more scale, gives us more incremental reach and gives us the opportunity to be strike-proof.”