Edgio says it’s ahead of the game when it comes to supporting FASTs

At the RAI in Amsterdam last weekend content delivery provider Edgio used the annual IBC conference to reinforce its new identity since rebranding from Limelight after it completed the acquisition of Edgecast over the summer.

Instead of showcasing new products, the company mainly used IBC to check back in with and highlight existing capabilities around channel scheduling and syndication endpoints for clients in-person, according to Jason Friedlander, marketing manager of the Edgio Streaming division, as the annual tradeshow returned live for the first time since 2019 after being put on hold due to Covid. Big things are coming this spring, he hinted without disclosing any details.

But when it comes to the emerging free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) space, Edgio has essentially been able to support FASTs from the get-go, Friedlander said.

With a streaming platform that started as Uplink in 2010, the company has served as the foundation of major OTT platforms in North America, created for and with broadcasters in mind to assist with the transformation from traditional linear TV to OTT, he noted. It’s served as the operational backbone to deliver video, specializing in operational and organizational scale that comes with building an OTT platform, traditionally catering to TV station groups, MVPDs and large platform-based customers.

Edgio has the second-largest edge delivery platform in the world, with its content delivery services product moving 230 terabits per second of data to hundreds of locations, CEO Bob Lyons had noted on the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call.  

Fast forward from its platform start over a decade ago and the TV landscape has seen a significant amount of change – but for Edgio, it’s not all new concepts.

“I think we were so far ahead of the game when we founded ourselves that the industry’s kind of caught up to the things we were doing,” Friedlander told Fierce on the sidelines at the RAI convention center. When it comes to FAST, “that’s literally what we did since day one,” he said.

For example, the company was instrumental with its first broadcast partner, where the idea was to take the company’s linear channels and put them online to be ad-supported. The live channels were encoded using Edgio technology to immediately become a video on-demand asset, then rescheduled to be on a channel and playback.

“So FAST, it’s in our DNA from day one,” Friedlander explained.

The free ad-supported streaming TV landscape is growing, with a variety of platforms, services and apps, as well as vendors. Consumers are increasingly turning to free streaming options that also provide a channel-surfing or on-demand experience – with Kantar data finding six out of 10 connected TV households are turning to FASTs either as a complement or instead of other entertainment services.  August survey data from Hub Entertainment Research found that in Q2 55% of consumers used at least one FAST service such as Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, Tubi, Amazon’s Freevee or the free version of Peacock. On the flip side, media owners are looking to FAST as a way to monetize and distribute large libraries of content in an ad-supported environment (with some FAST owners hoping to attract users to their more premium services via the proverbial flywheel), while platforms look to expand programming cost effectively and pull in viewers and ad dollars.

So what is new when it comes to FASTs for Edgio? That would be the distribution of FAST channels to syndicated endpoints, he noted.

“Instead of it just being their app, now we have to support the distribution to the syndication partners that they have,” Friedlander said. “That’s been a big change and one that came pretty quickly” in terms of the amount of end points you need to support.

On that front, Edgio has had to keep up with capabilities, specifically where it specializes in server-side ad insertion. Previously, clients were doing that on their own platforms, but now Edgio needs to be able to give customers all of the markers to support ad-insertion on third-party platforms.

“Things like that is technology we had to build and expose for the partners to be able to help monetize content,” he noted.

One thing that makes ad insertion for FASTs slightly more challenging, according to Friedlander, is that there’s no longer full control of a company’s own platform – but instead delivering it to a third-party’s specifications and what they need.

However, the challenges with FAST aren’t technical, according to Friedlander, but rather scale and achieving it with concurrent viewers.

That said, Edgio’s platform is powering millions of concurrent views “all the time and inserting billions of ads a year,” he said. It doesn’t require a lot of people to manage, he added. And the scale to deliver personalized streams to users is again something the vendor’s been building from the start “and growing as more and more audiences come to OTT platforms.”

Amagi, another vendor working in the FAST space, also doesn’t see technical challenges to overcome but rather business challenges for FAST. Check out more from Amagi’s co-founder here.