GUIDE

What is a FAST channel? Free television, rebuilt on streaming.

A FAST channel is a linear TV channel that streams over the internet, free to watch and paid for by advertising. FAST stands for Free Ad-supported Streaming Television. To the viewer it behaves like a cable channel. To the operator it is a channel launched without a cable deal, a transponder, or anyone's permission.

Definition

Old model, new plumbing

Free, ad-supported, linear television is the oldest business model in broadcasting. What FAST changed is everything around it. Pluto TV proved the shape in 2014 by arranging internet video into channels with a guide, and by 2019 Viacom thought enough of the result to buy the company. The television manufacturers then built the model straight into their sets: Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels and The Roku Channel now sit one button away from the HDMI inputs, stocked with hundreds of channels nobody pays a cable bill for.

The reason the model came back is that streaming removed the two costs that made broadcast a club. Distribution used to mean spectrum, transponder leases or carriage on a cable system, each a scarce thing controlled by somebody else. Delivery over the internet is none of those. And the audience arrived on its own: smart TVs made a streamed channel land in the living room, on the big screen, exactly where a broadcast channel would have.

What did not change is the viewer's side of the bargain. A schedule someone else curates, free of charge, with ad breaks as the price. Decades of habit turn out to transfer intact: put a guide in front of people and they lean back and watch what is on.

What makes it FAST

Four properties, all required

Each one can exist without the others, and the combinations have their own names. All four together is what the industry means by FAST.

It is linear
A FAST channel runs a schedule. Something is on now, something else is on next, and a programme guide says what and when. That is the defining property, and it is what separates FAST from every free on-demand library on the internet.
It is free to the viewer
No subscription and no paywall, which removes the single biggest barrier between a new channel and an audience. Nobody has ever had to talk themselves into sampling a free channel.
Advertising pays for it
The schedule carries ad breaks, marked in the stream with SCTE-35 cues, and an ad server fills them with paying spots. The viewer’s attention is the product; the break markers are the shelf it is sold from.
It streams over the internet
No transponder, no cable headend, no tuner. The channel is encoded once, delivered as HLS, and watched on smart TVs, phones, and the web. Distribution cost stops being the moat it was for fifty years.

Distribution

Where FAST channels live.

The channel is one thing; where people find it is a separate decision, and the trade is the same one every time: reach you did not build, in exchange for control and a share of the money.

The storefronts

Carriage on the big platforms

Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels, The Roku Channel, Pluto TV and their peers put hundreds of channels into the menus of the TVs people already own. Carriage brings reach you could not buy, and takes in return a revenue share, an editorial bar, and timelines you do not control.

Direct

Your own distribution

The same channel on your own site, player and apps. You keep the whole of the ad inventory, own the viewer relationship and the analytics, and answer to no gatekeeper. The audience arrives at whatever speed your own marketing earns it.

Both

The usual answer

One playout can feed the storefronts and your own player at once. Operators commonly launch direct to prove the channel, then take the working channel and its numbers into carriage conversations, which go noticeably better with an audience already attached.

Economics

How the money actually works

FAST revenue is a short equation: impressions served, times the CPM (the price an advertiser pays per thousand impressions), divided by a thousand. Everything else in the business is an input to one of those two numbers. Audience and ad load drive impressions. Content quality, audience data and sales effort drive the CPM.

The number that governs the whole model is fill rate: what fraction of your ad breaks actually contain a paying ad rather than a slate or a house promo. Projections love to assume it is high. In practice it is earned, break by break, by having clean SCTE-35 markers a demand partner can target, audience numbers a buyer believes, and enough viewers to be worth anyone's campaign budget.

On the cost side, the classic FAST trap is infrastructure that meters. A linear channel runs about 730 hours a month whether ten people watch or ten thousand, which is the worst possible shape for per-hour playout fees and per-gigabyte delivery. It is why our own FAST plans are flat, with delivery included, and why ad serving here bills at $1 per thousand impressions counted only when the ad verifiably reached a viewer. The monetization page covers how those delivery-confirmed counts work.

Common mix-ups

Three things FAST is not

Not a YouTube channel

YouTube is on demand, algorithmic, and owns your audience relationship, your monetization terms and your continued existence on the platform. A FAST channel is a schedule you control on infrastructure that treats you as the broadcaster. The two coexist happily: many operators turn a YouTube back catalogue into a linear channel and keep both running.

Not AVOD

Ad-supported video on demand shares the business model but not the format. AVOD is a library the viewer browses; FAST is a channel that is simply on. The same service often carries both, which is where the confusion comes from: Tubi's library is AVOD, Tubi's channels are FAST.

Not the machinery underneath

FAST names a business model, not a technology. The thing that actually runs the schedule, renders the graphics and marks the breaks is playout. If the machinery is the part you are trying to understand, start with what cloud playout is.

Launch one

The business model is the easy half to explain. The product page covers the machinery: scheduling, graphics, ad signalling, the guide, and per-plan detail, with a channel live in minutes once your content is ready.

FAST & linear TV, the product

Questions

FAST channels, answered.

What does FAST stand for?

Free Ad-supported Streaming Television. Each word is doing work: the channel is free to the viewer, advertising pays for it, it arrives over the internet rather than through a tuner or a dish, and it is television in the linear sense, a schedule running around the clock rather than a library you browse.

Are FAST channels really free to watch?

Free to the viewer, yes. No subscription, no account in most cases, no card on file. The viewer pays with a few minutes of ad breaks per hour, the same bargain broadcast television has offered since the 1940s. The costs of running the channel are carried by the operator and recovered from advertisers.

How do FAST channels make money?

Advertising, sold against the ad breaks the channel marks in its stream. Revenue is impressions times the price of a thousand of them (the CPM), so the three levers are audience size, how many ad minutes an hour the programming can carry, and what proportion of the breaks actually get filled with paying ads. That last number, the fill rate, is the one nobody quotes and the one that decides whether projections survive contact with reality.

What is the difference between FAST and cable TV?

The viewing experience is deliberately similar: channels, a guide, programmes at scheduled times. The plumbing and the economics are different. Cable needs carriage agreements, set-top boxes and regional infrastructure, and the viewer pays a monthly bill. A FAST channel streams over the open internet, is free at the point of viewing, and can be launched by a single operator without a carriage negotiation.

What is the difference between FAST and AVOD?

Both are free and ad-supported. AVOD is on demand: the viewer picks a title from a library, the way YouTube or the on-demand side of Tubi works. FAST is linear: the channel decides what plays now, the viewer joins mid-stream the way they would join a cable channel. The distinction matters commercially because linear viewing produces long sessions and predictable ad load, which is exactly what advertisers buy.

Do I need Samsung, Roku or Pluto to launch a FAST channel?

No. The big storefronts are one distribution route, not a requirement. Carriage there brings audience you did not have to build, in exchange for a revenue share, their editorial gate, and a queue that moves at their pace. A channel can equally run direct: your own player, your own site and apps, your own ad inventory. Plenty of operators do both from the same playout.

How much does it cost to start a FAST channel?

The published price here is $254 per channel per month billed yearly, or $299 month to month, with playout, graphics, the programme guide and delivery included. The bigger budget question is usually content rights, not infrastructure. The full cost breakdown, including what metered competitors charge for the same always-on channel, is set out in what a TV channel costs.

What is a FAST aggregator, and do I need one?

A company that takes your library or your existing feed, builds and runs the channel on its own playout, places it with the platforms it already has deals with, and pays you a share of the ad revenue. Usually nothing upfront, which is the whole appeal. The price is paid in a different currency: the aggregator serves the manifest, inserts the ads and counts the impressions, so the share you receive is worked out from a report only they can produce, for the life of the deal. That suits a rights holder with a deep catalogue and no wish to operate anything. If you want the channel to be yours, run it on your own playout, keep the count, and treat an aggregator as one more carriage partner you can add or drop.

What content works on a FAST channel?

Library depth beats individual hits. A linear channel consumes about 730 hours a month, so a catalogue that can fill a week without repeating badly matters more than one strong title. Niche and single-genre channels do well precisely because the audience knows what the channel is at a glance: one community, one sport, one era of drama, rather than a general entertainment grab bag.

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