Industry Insights: Redefining platform strategy in streaming, FAST and CTV

Streaming, FAST and connected TV are no longer adjacent strategies, they are central to how broadcasters plan distribution, monetization and audience engagement.

In this Industry Insights roundtable, vendors examine how platform priorities are shifting, what defines a “strategic” presence and how operators balance scale with control. The discussion explores when to expand FAST portfolios, how platform relationships are evolving and what infrastructure decisions enable speed and flexibility.

As broadcasters mature into full-scale streaming operators, the conversation points toward a more complex, data-driven and multi-platform future – where success depends on aligning technology, content and monetization across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Platform priorities shift: Broadcasters are distinguishing between must-have distribution and strategic platforms that drive growth, engagement and monetization.
• FAST enables experimentation: The ability to quickly launch channels allows operators to test formats, iterate and scale what works.
• Control becomes critical: As broadcasters mature, they are prioritizing ownership of data, user experience and monetization over pure reach.
• Complexity scales fast: Expanding FAST portfolios introduces challenges in scheduling, metadata, rights management and platform fragmentation.
• Infrastructure drives agility: Cloud-based, modular and automated systems are essential for rapid channel launches and long-term scalability.

How do you decide which streaming and FAST platforms are strategic priorities versus “must-have” distribution?

Santiago Rodríguez, TV platform lead, AgileTV: Strategic platforms are usually those where audience scale, monetization potential, and data visibility align. Broadcasters increasingly distinguish between must-have platforms, where absence can negatively impact reach or accelerate churn, and strategic platforms that help drive growth, differentiation, and deeper audience engagement. The key is balancing broad distribution with focusing efforts where audiences are actually growing.

Roberto Musso, technical director, NDI: From a technology standpoint, the platforms that matter most are the ones where infrastructure decisions have real consequences for scale and quality. Broad reach is a given, but deeper integration with IP-based workflows is what separates a strategic platform from a checkbox. We see operators prioritizing platforms where they can maintain control over the viewing experience without rebuilding their entire stack.

What signals tell you it’s time to launch a new FAST channel versus deepening investment in existing ones?

Martins Magone, CTO, Veset: What really matters with FAST channels is that broadcasters and content owners can move quickly to launch them without having to set up complex and costly infrastructure. When they have the ability to launch FAST channels quickly and easily, broadcasters can afford to experiment with formats and themes, to see what works best with audiences; if FAST channels are attracting viewers and generating sufficient ad-revenue to make them worthwhile, then it pays to launch other similar FAST channels or to launch existing channels onto more platforms quickly to maximize revenue.

Santiago Rodríguez, TV platform lead, AgileTV: The decision often comes down to content depth and audience behavior. If a catalog can sustain a strong identity and regular programming cadence, it may justify a dedicated FAST channel. Otherwise, optimizing existing channels and improving discovery can often deliver better results than simply expanding the portfolio.

How are platform relationships evolving as broadcasters become more sophisticated streaming operators themselves?

Krzysztof Bartkowski, CEO, Big Blue Marble: Broadcasters are no longer the junior partners in these relationships and as they evolve into full-scale streaming operators, they’re demanding transparency on audience data, revenue attribution and performance metrics, and platforms that can’t provide it will lose premium content. Broadcasters now understand streaming economics as well as the platforms and they expect partnerships to reflect that reality. Closer technical integration and clearer data sharing are helping ensure that distribution and monetization strategies are aligned but accountability is the next core focus area and the need for shared ownership of the viewer experience.

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Mrugesh Desai, VP, North America, Accedo: Historically, broadcasters partnered with platforms for reach, but as they’ve become more sophisticated streaming operators, they’re now focused on control, over user experience, data, and ultimately monetization. At the same time, we’re seeing increased tension around data ownership and monetization models. Broadcasters want deeper access to first-party data and more flexibility in how they manage subscriptions, advertising, and bundling while platforms are still balancing their role as both enablers and gatekeepers. This is leading to more structured, and sometimes more complex, commercial and technical negotiations.

Rick Young, SVP and head of global products, LTN Global: Many organizations now distribute content across a combination of station apps, league platforms, FAST channels, and third-party streaming services as part of a broader multi-platform strategy. This shift reflects a growing focus on maintaining control over monetization, advertising inventory, and audience insights. Some broadcasters are building more capabilities internally to support direct-to-consumer initiatives, while others partner with leagues or major platforms that already operate established streaming ecosystems.

Dave Dembowski, chief revenue officer, Operative: Streamers are starting to lead discussions for content rights such as with sports franchises and for large advertising contracts with agencies and brands. This means that the conversations become more data-driven and more focused on multi-platform distribution. This also opens discussions for innovative ways to monetize premium content across platforms.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Broadcasters with strong first-party data now negotiate from a position of strength, turning distribution into a more balanced, two-sided exchange. However, CTV platforms still hold significant leverage through their control over the home screen and content discovery.

Roberto Musso, technical director, NDI: Broadcasters know their workflows now in a way they simply didn’t a few years back, and that changes what they ask for from platforms. The conversations are more technical and more specific, covering ingest flexibility, monitoring, and data sharing rather than just distribution reach. That sophistication is pushing platforms to open up in ways that benefit the whole ecosystem.

What role do owned-and-operated platforms play compared to third-party FAST and CTV ecosystems?

Santiago Rodríguez, TV platform lead, AgileTV: Owned platforms remain critical because they provide full control over the user experience, data, and monetization strategy. At the same time, third-party FAST and CTV ecosystems offer scale and audience discovery that can be difficult to achieve alone. Most service providers are now pursuing hybrid strategies that balance both.

What operational challenges emerge when scaling from one or two channels to a multi-channel FAST portfolio?

Srividhya Srinivasan, co-founder and CTO, Amagi: Scheduling becomes exponentially harder. You’re juggling content refresh cycles, expiring rights windows, regional overrides, and platform-specific requirements. Metadata errors that were once minor annoyances suddenly affect discoverability, compliance, and monetization at scale. Platform fragmentation adds another layer. Each partner has different ingest specs, ad integrations, reporting formats, and monetization setups. At the same time, revenue optimization gets more dynamic — CPMs, fill rates, and ad load strategies vary by geography and device.

Jonathan Smith, VP, sales business development, Net Insight: At a small scale, FAST operations can be managed manually, assembling a few thematic fast schedules alongside traditional broadcast operations and tooling. But complexity grows exponentially as channel counts increase. Challenges quickly shift to automation, orchestration, monitoring, rights distribution.

Martins Magone, CTO, Veset: Although operational requirements will differ depending on the type of channel being broadcast, to playout a single channel, broadcasters typically need to manage ingest feeds, media content, scheduling, graphics, ad insertion, and monitoring. These complexities are amplified when moving from one or two channels to a multi-channel operation because broadcasters are having to coordinate all these different functions at the same time for each channel. To manage these kinds of complexities at scale when lots of channels are being broadcast concurrently, broadcasters need a playout and channel management system that offers advanced features and functionality, automation, intelligent management and analytical tools, and an intuitive, easy to use UI.

Santiago Rodríguez, TV platform lead, AgileTV: Scale introduces complexity across scheduling, content rights management, metadata consistency, audience segmentation, and operational workflows. What works manually for one or two channels quickly becomes inefficient at scale. As portfolios grow, automation and centralized orchestration become essential to maintain quality and efficiency, while stronger audience profiling helps maximize monetization across diverse FAST channels.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Scaling forces a shift from manual oversight to rigorous metadata hygiene and automated EPG management to avoid high operational costs. A unified player framework with shared telemetry is essential to prevent device-specific ABR tuning from becoming an unmanageable maintenance burden.

Roberto Musso, technical director, NDI: Going from two channels to ten surfaces problems that were easy to miss at smaller scale. Metadata gaps, scheduling errors, and signal inconsistencies that someone caught manually before just start slipping through. Operators who build repeatable, standardized workflows early have a much easier time of it.

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How are broadcasters balancing automation with editorial control in channel creation and management?

Jonathan Smith, VP, sales business development, Net Insight: Automation is essential for scale, but broadcasters are increasingly careful not to remove human oversight entirely. The trend is toward rule-based schedule automation that preserves editorial intent while reducing manual intervention. The more successful models allow businesses to define parameters and guardrails and provide brand alignment rather than manage resource heavy day-to-day operations.

Mrugesh Desai, VP, North America, Accedo: As we’ve seen from some high-profile errors in AI generated news summaries, there’s a delicate balance to be struck between automation and maintaining editorial control. It’s important that broadcasters and service providers follow a human-in-the loop design approach where humans design the process, set expected outputs, and review outputs before automation is enabled. Additionally, rather than moving too quickly toward automation, a phased, incremental approach combined with fine tuning and iteration is also essential because it allows for testing and validation, to check the quality of outputs before moving on to the next stage.

Martins Magone, CTO, Veset: Just as is the case with pretty much every aspect of broadcasting, playout and channel management has increased in complexity as more sources, formats and distribution methods have been added to the mix. As a result of this increasing complexity, automation has become a critical component of playout because it allows for time consuming and repetitive tasks to be automated, for example QC functionality at ingest to verify media playability, extract metadata, analyze audio loudness, and verify secondary data streams such as subtitles etc. This frees up operators to concentrate on those more complex tasks, which still require hands on editorial control.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Broadcasters use automation as a performance floor for scheduling and ad insertion, while keeping humans in the loop to maintain editorial nuance and quality. Player-level telemetry acts as a bridge, flagging viewer drop-offs where automated transitions may be failing.

What infrastructure decisions matter most when planning for rapid FAST or OTT expansion?

Srividhya Srinivasan, co-founder and CTO, Amagi: Cloud-native playout is foundational. It allows you to spin up and regionalize channels quickly without investing in physical infrastructure. A multi-CDN strategy is equally critical. As your footprint grows, performance, redundancy, and global reliability matter more than ever. Server-side ad insertion (SSAI) should be built in from day one. It ensures consistent monetization across platforms and unlocks dynamic targeting and yield optimization. Monetization architecture can’t be an afterthought.

Krzysztof Bartkowski, CEO, Big Blue Marble: Streaming audiences now expect the same consistency they associate with traditional broadcast. Operators planning for expansion therefore need a delivery architecture that is built to withstand traffic surges and doesn’t rely on manual intervention when failure occurs, supported by constant insight into real-world performance. They also need a clear understanding of how delivery costs scale as audiences grow, particularly during high-profile moments.

Jonathan Smith, VP, sales business development, Net Insight: Flexibility and resiliency are more critical than optimizing for a single deployment model; we need to remember that FAST does not equal traditional linear broadcasting. Broadcasters need infrastructure that can scale dynamically, be heavily automated end-to-end, support multiple delivery platforms, and adapt to changing distribution and monetization requirements. Early decisions around transport, automation, and control layers have long-term impact on both cost and speed.

Martins Magone, CTO, Veset: FAST channels need to be underpinned by highly flexible and agile infrastructure so that broadcasters can quickly capitalize on their content libraries and launch new FAST channels quickly and easily when the time is right. Traditional hardware-based playout systems are rigid and inflexible by nature so don’t allow for new FAST channels to be easily launched and scaled. Cloud-based playout on the other hand makes it easy for broadcasters to create, manage and distribute FAST channels across mobile, web and CTV platforms quickly, and at the same time providing all the tools needed to deliver broadcast-grade experiences at scale, without the cost or complexity of traditional hardware-based infrastructure.

Santiago Rodríguez, TV platform lead, AgileTV: Flexibility is key. Broadcasters increasingly prioritize modular, cloud-based infrastructures that allow them to launch or adjust services quickly without major upfront investment. Scalability, interoperability with ad tech ecosystems, and the ability to manage multiple distribution partners are also critical considerations.

Reinhard Grandl, chief product officer, Bitmovin: Streaming services need flexible and scalable infrastructure that allows them to respond quickly to changing market demands and viewer preferences. This of course means minimizing back-end complexity wherever possible and simplifying core streaming processes such as encoding, delivery and playback, so that both time to market and infrastructure costs are reduced. The challenge comes because many streaming services have been forced to expand quickly and as a result find themselves managing overly complicated technology stacks and high levels of operational friction.

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Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Prioritize protocol-agnostic playback and decouple the CDN/origin layer from the player to avoid platform-specific re-engineering. This modularity prevents technical debt and allows you to swap components independently as you scale.

How are cloud and hybrid playout models changing speed-to-market for new channels?

Srividhya Srinivasan, co-founder and CTO, Amagi: Cloud and hybrid playout models are fundamentally compressing the time it takes to launch and scale new channels. Virtualized playout environments can be provisioned in days rather than months, with compute, storage, and encoding scaled on demand. Templates, automation, and workflow orchestration allow broadcasters to replicate channel configurations quickly, enabling rapid deployment of genre-based channels, event-driven pop-ups, or regional variants without physical duplication.

Krzysztof Bartkowski, CEO, Big Blue Marble: Cloud and hybrid playout models are significantly reducing the time required to bring new channels to market. What once required long deployment cycles can now happen in weeks, sometimes days, allowing broadcasters to respond quickly to changing audience demand and new programming or partnership opportunities. This approach also enables experimentation, making it easier and commercially realistic to introduce thematic channels, pop-up formats or rapid extensions of existing content libraries. Speed, however, brings higher expectations and if you can’t launch quickly, someone else will occupy that niche first.

Jonathan Smith, VP, sales business development, Net Insight: Cloud and hybrid models significantly reduce launch timelines by decoupling channel creation from fixed hardware investments in physical locations and allowing short term commercial models that provide agility. Hybrid approaches allow broadcasters to mature from the market probing launches, they give a route to blend cloud agility with deterministic performance and better mid to long term investment structures. This balance enables faster experimentation and ideation with the ability to lets the business scale in the future.

Martins Magone, CTO, Veset: While it may take months or even longer to launch new channels with traditional playout systems because dedicated hardware needs to be sourced and installed, with cloud playout, channels can be created and launched within a matter of hours. This is transformational for broadcasters because it allows them to operate with flexibility and agility, scaling up and down in line with business opportunities and demand. To further accelerate speed-to-market, we have also recently added a new self-service subscription portal to our cloud playout solution, Veset Nimbus, giving broadcasters immediate access so they can start creating and managing professional linear channels in the cloud straight away without a lengthy sign up and onboarding process.

Yang Cai, CEO and president, VisualOn: Cloud playout eliminates hardware bottlenecks, but true speed-to-market is won by having a pre-tested player layer ready for the fragmented CTV landscape. Hybrid models balance this by keeping low-latency live paths on-prem while offloading VOD and replay to the cloud.

David Edwards, product manager, Techex: Cloud and hybrid playout are reducing launch timelines from months to days. By virtualizing infrastructure and giving broadcasters on-demand elasticity, they can spin up new channels, regional variants, or event feeds at the speed the business requires but without compromising operational confidence. It will turn playout from a constraint into an enabler of rapid innovation. 

Roberto Musso, technical director, NDI: Cloud playout has fundamentally changed the economics of launching a new channel by removing the hardware procurement cycle from the critical path. Operators can stand up a channel, test it against real audience data, and make decisions without a significant capital commitment upfront. Hybrid models give them the flexibility to run cloud for most programming while keeping the reliability of dedicated infrastructure for high-stakes live content.