SME#16: Social Media & FAST, a match made in heaven?
Streaming Made Easy #16
Welcome back to Streaming Made Easy. This week, we take a look at how Social Media & FAST explore building bridges between one another.
Today at a glance:
Analysis: Social Media & FAST, a match made in heaven?
Streamer snapshot: Turning creators into broadcasters, Streemfire
Content recommendation: Oscar’s worthy movie, The Whale
💡 Analysis:
I’m not one to use the expression “streaming wars”. Two reasons for that:
I hate irrelevant military terms applied to the entertainment business.
It’s reductive.
On n°2, I mean that it leads us to believe that streamers compete against each other only when they actually compete with dozens of other daily activities we have ranging from sleeping, parenting, working and chilling.
Which leads me to today’s analysis. One activity that takes away our attention from TV (whether Broadcast or FAST) is: social media.
If you look at US Adult Users, they spend 23 to 56 minutes per day on a social media platform. You could say, well it still gives them time to watch TV, it’s true they can and probably will to some extent. However, video will account for 56.3% of the time US adults spend with social networks this year, up nearly 9 percentage points from 2021 according to eMarketer, meaning that US adults already enjoy a daily dose of video through social. The habit is built and growing.
We’ve seen the impact particularly on the 16-24s demo with young Brits' Broadcast TV viewing going down 2/3rd in a decade. The 16-24s demo watch seven times less Broadcast TV than those aged 65+ (source: BARB).
This immediately brings the question of how Media & Entertainment companies can exist in Social Media to capture some of that video usage. I won’t detail the Social Media strategies of M&E companies though (an idea for another edition of “Streaming Made Easy”) but rather focus on the initiatives done to bring Social Media to FAST.
FAST has the ambition of appealing widely but particularly to young viewers Broadcast TV now struggles to.
So how can you appeal to this sought after audience?
One way is to bring the creators they follow on Social Media to TV.
Last week, The Roku Channel announced a partnership with Jellysmack.
For those of you who don’t know Jellysmack, it’s a Global Creator Company (created in France in 2016) with technology at its core. One of the founders, Swann Maizil, created the “Oh my goal” channel and used data to grow its audience. He quickly realized that technology could boost any channel’s performance with the right set of video and data analytics tools.
Today, Jellysmack, it’s:
500 creators bolstering 10B monthly views
6B views on Stories
125M+ US monthly unique visitors
Originals like Beauty Studio, Oh my goal, Gamology, House of Bounce, Binge Society
Now back to The Roku Channel ⚡Jellysmack partnership.
Jellysmack launched 2 FAST channels on the Roku Channel with content from 17 creators.
Hello Inspo (lifestyle) brings beauty, style hacks, home makeovers, recipes, DIYs and more, features content from creators including Brad Mondo, Lauren Riihimaki (LaurDIY), Emmeline Mayline Cho (Emmymade), Liz Fenwick, HeXtian, Hellthy JunkFood (JP Lambiase and Julia Goolia), Smitha Deepak, Josh Elkin and Karina Garcia.
Mysteria (true crime) offers content from creators including Stephanie Soo, Christina Randall, True Crime Recaps (Amy Townsend and Chris Nathan), Killer Bites, Dr. Todd Grande, John Lordan (LordanArts), Brooke Makenna and Danelle Hallan.
I don’t know any of them 😅 but their audience does.
With this move, what does Roku and Jellysmack expect?
For Roku:
The channels tick high demanded genres: lifestyle and true crime.
The content is FAST friendly because again FAST is not appointment TV so you bump in and start watching something.
Recognizable influencers with their followers.
A chance to attract brands and advertisers keen (desperate?) to reach this valuable audience that is the Gen Z. The gap between Social Media & TV when it comes to their ad attention span is meaninful.
For Jellysmack:
Audience extension
Audience mix with an older audience potentially watching
A longer content life span (beyond the 1st 24 hours on social)
An additional revenue stream
Now, we understand the why behind this move but will it pan out?
It's not without challenges:
- How do you make content fit for a 6-inch screen work on a 50-inch one?
- How do you push followers to come to the big screen?
- Do you end up attracting an older demo only?
Given the growing weight of the creator economy, I expect more initiatives from FAST and Creator Platforms to test and learn the audience's appeal.
I’ll leave you with numbers from Tubular Labs that will make you dizzy:
Influencer content was watched 13.2 times more than media and brand content combined.
2023 projected influencer viewership hitting some 10 trillion views per month across all platforms (up from around 5 trillion views per month in January 2022).
📺 Streamer snapshot:
Taking about Social Media and TV, I thought it would make sense to introduce you to Streemfire from fellow entrepreneur, Niklas Trenkler.
Streemfire provides the first TV network for user-generated content. The vision is to give a platform to creators who produce engaging content vastly underrepresented on the big screen. With Streemfire, anybody can become a broadcaster and share their content on TV.
Check them out 👉 Streemfire
🎬 Content recommendation:
A24 Films amazes me by the boldness of their editorial line in a business where thought-provoking content is no longer the rule but rather the exception. A cinema that sometimes struggles to find its way into our living room because we want to stream and chill.
The whale is no exception. It’s not relaxing to say the least but what an overwhelming story about a reclusive English teacher who attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. As always, Darren Aronofsky doesn’t spare us. A scene in particular reminded me of one from “Requiem for a dream”.
And Brendan Fraser showing us he’s more than George of the jungle or The mummy.
I’m team Brendan Fraser for this year’s Oscars!
No chilling, just feeling 👉 The whale
That’s it folks. Enjoy your weekend and see you next Friday for another edition of Streaming Made Easy!
By night, I write Streaming Made Easy and post each working day on Linkedin.
By day, I run The Local Act, a streaming video consultancy.
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