In a bygone era, kids could access children’s educational programming like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, or Arthur through their local PBS affiliate on linear TV. But as kids (and the adults in their lives) largely turn to streaming, PBS has been hard at work trying to reach kids where they are.
At a panel at CES earlier this month, Ira Rubenstein, chief digital and marketing officer at PBS, said that the company has been building its streaming presence, including through a free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel on Amazon Prime Video. It’s not just PBS that’s leaning into FAST programming: According to several executives, FAST channels, which seek to mimic the experience of linear TV with always-on channels, are expected to grow more popular in 2025, ideally making programming more discoverable—and, in some cases, more shoppable.
“The acceptance and growth of FAST [is] incredibly relevant to what the future of our business is going to be,” Melissa Wasserman, head of marketing at Samsung Ads, said onstage.
Hide and seek: It’s no secret that streaming is becoming increasingly fragmented, with platforms like Netflix and Peacock vying for viewers’ attention and with popular shows and sporting events being scattered across different platforms. FAST channels can help cut through the noise and make content easier to find, Peter Hamilton, senior director of product management at Roku, told Marketing Brew.
“We see very young audiences adopting live and FAST,” he said. “The decision matrix has gotten very complicated, so they just want to channel-flip and find the things that they’re interested in or find creators that they’re interested in.”
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Wasserman echoed similar sentiments, noting that comedian Nikki Glaser’s 2025 Golden Globes monologue included jokes about the difficulty of discovering programming on streaming.
Amid the fragmentation, though, some players operating FAST channels are on the rise: Samsung TV Plus had 88 million monthly active users as of October, and Roku, which operates The Roku Channel, announced this month that it reached 90 million streaming households in the first week of the new year.
Easy as pie: With FAST on the rise, Hamilton expects streamers to be focused on making it more optimal for advertisers. In some cases, that’s already happening: In September, Roku introduced Roku Ads Manager, a self-service tool for advertisers to buy ads. The tool is integrated with Shopify, so merchants can place shoppable ads for their goods on Roku content, FAST or otherwise.
Prime Video has similarly leaned into shoppable FAST ads, rolling out an Amazon Live interactive shoppable FAST channel last April that let users shop goods from creators and reality TV celebrities while watching always-on programming.
At Roku, the plan is to expand shoppable ads from ad-supported video-on-demand into live programming, including FAST, Hamilton said, something he expects will occur elsewhere.
“You’ll see everyone do that—all players [will] extend shoppable experiences into FAST and live,” he said. “Over the coming year, the important piece that has to come into play is this simplifying of shoppable ads.”
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