The world of streaming—sitting, as it does, at the money-rich, comprehension-poor intersection between Hollywood C-suite types, tech bros, and the ever-looming invisible hand of finance—is awash in acronyms. Letter assemblies like VODs, SVODs, OTTs, and more have flooded the business of just trying to figure out where the fuck a new movie is streaming in recent years, and, on that score, we’ll give credit to new hot-thing-on-the-market FAST, which Disney is now supposedly flirting with: At least it’s a goddamn word.
That’s “free ad-supported streaming television,” in case it wasn’t clear—making FAST, among other things, a pretty obvious backronym skating by on the hyphen in the middle of “ad-supported.” (We promise to stop getting bogged down on this aspect of this story, starting… now.) At the moment, FAS-STs mostly refer to streamers like Tubi, which operate on a basic deal not all that different from broadcast TV: Watch some commercials, and you’ll get to watch some content, with no money changing hands. The big paid streamers have expressed curiosity about this idea in recent years, after building out their own ad networks to support the reduced-price-with-ad plans than have helped, say, Netflix, colonize even larger percentages of the human population’s various screens. But nobody has pulled the trigger yet on going fully ad-supported, and especially not in the American market, where there hasn’t really been a major first-run FAST streaming service since Hulu eliminated its free tier in the mid-2010s.
Disney’s interest in the model was logged as part of an earnings call today featuring new CEO Josh “Job Cuts” D’Amaro, who told investors the company was “exploring” the idea. “We’re exploring a free product for consumers, one that will allow us to accomplish several goals and hopefully do that efficiently,” D’Amaro said on Wednesday (per THR). “First, we see it as a way to expand our reach to a customer segment that’s more price sensitive, and expanding our reach is as we’ve talked about before, one of our strategic priorities.” D’Amaro added that “Second, unlike a lot of our AVOD competitors, we’re fairly well sold, meaning more inventory would actually help us accelerate our ad revenue growth,” which is the kind of sentence that we’re sure had investors murmuring and nodding in happy approval like the background board member extras in a TV show about A Business Man.
Interestingly, this isn’t the only big move D’Amaro announced or hinted at on Wednesday: Disney also announced this afternoon that it’s signed a deal with TikTok to enter into a “wide-ranging” partnership that will give users of the social media video site access to Disney assets for their video making, while Disney will be allowed to host Disney-related videos on Disney+. Bizarrely, that includes floating the idea that this could get creators jobs at the Mouse, as “best-in class creators” will be offered “access to exclusive events and career development pathways.” So, great news, children of the internet: You might soon be able to watch a bunch of commercials so that you can then watch TikTok creators make other commercials for Disney, in the Quixotic hope of getting jobs there. The future: Still extremely cool.
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