Here's why 'Westworld' probably won't be the last big HBO show to go FAST

If David Zaslav knows anything, it's pre-programmed, ad-supported TV channels. So it makes sense that his Warner Bros. Discovery is launching on FAST, also known as free, ad-supported streaming TV. Given his recent high-profile cleanup of HBO Max's library, most notably with "Westworld," consider it the method of his madness.

Warner Bros. Discovery goes fast, well, fast. During the company's latest quarterly earnings call, Zaslav said WBD "will aggressively attack the AVOD market with our own FAST offering in 2023." Between that and the impending combination of HBO Max and Discovery+, WBD engineers should probably plan to work over the holidays.

Mr. Zaslav sees his company's giant library of movies and TV series as a "unique opportunity to increase our potential market and create real value." Considering April's mega-merger between Discovery and AT&T's WarnerMedia assets, he's right.

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There's "a huge amount of content that's not even on [HBO Max/Discovery+] that's in our house that hasn't been monetized in the marketplace. We will sell some of it, some of which we have talked, and we started selling," Zaslav said on the third-quarter earnings call. "But we have the ability on the FAST side to build a service without buying content. Most players in this space buy content and then look to sell that content and build a vig, effectively where they get a return on that content based on what they spent on it. »

The addition of FAST to its existing hybrid AVOD/SVOD platforms (which, again, will become one in the spring) makes Warner Bros. Discovery a "full service", in Zaslav's words. It is an increasingly necessary concept in a difficult macroeconomic environment, especially outside the United States.

"All the big services will need a FAST channel, not so much in the US," said Alan Wolk, co-founder and principal analyst of TVREV, who coined the acronym FAST in 2018. Where lives of much of the world's population, "People just don't have the money for subscription TV services," he told IndieWire. In these often underdeveloped countries, they "expect heavier ad loads" and "banner ads at the bottom of the screen while the show airs." For free access, this is a well-tolerated compromise.

There is also a "flying" effect where a free tier can convert users to paid subscriptions, he said. "Westworld", in this case, could be a "decoy" for HBO Max. That's why "Westworld," the big-budget, high-concept, and much-loved HBO series (for a time!) with an incredible season 1 and three more seasons after that, will soon be a giveaway.

"In the past, a show like this would never have aired against advertising," Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of NScreenMedia, told IndieWire during a separate phone call. "So it's a big blow."

Big, but logical. “Once a show has been sitting in a library for several years – no matter how good it is – it won't be watched much,” Dixon said. "This kind of show, there's definitely a lot of room to monetize it in other ways."