FreeCast’s Instant Co-Brand Beats Building Your Own Platform

The media industry has fundamentally changed, and even the companies most heavily invested in the old pay TV economics have come around to the truth: linear TV is on the way out, and streaming is the new normal. Long-time holdouts like Paramount, ESPN, cable news, and sports leagues have all finally realized they need direct-to-consumer streaming distribution.

While the industry has been headed in that direction for a long time, shifting focus away from highly lucrative cable TV relationships towards expensive-to-build and slow-to-profit streaming offerings was an unattractive choice for a long time. In many ways, it still is, with the laggards being pushed to the decision out of necessity.

Of course, that’s speaking specifically about the nation’s largest media empires: multi-billion-dollar entertainment businesses with linear pay channels on cable and satellite, national broadcast networks, movie studios, and more.

These big businesses have pioneered the streaming space, and done so with mixed results at best. First-party streaming services are just recently starting to show their first profits. While some black on the balance sheet seems like a big accomplishment, especially after years of burning millions of dollars, this is far from off-setting the billions in investment that it took to get to this point.

Despite billions sunk across technology and marketing costs that will likely never be recovered, these big media empires are in the “strong” positions, which is less an endorsement of their strategies and more a comment on the dire combination of urgency and risks facing everyone else who wants to launch a video service.

Going It Alone is No Longer an Option

For smaller media companies and broadcasters, the crisis has arrived: they face sharply declining revenues from linear TV, with neither the war chest nor the decade the big guys had to figure out streaming. For any other type of business that wants to try and capitalize on the disruption and jump in to the media or video distribution business, the barriers to entry are arguably higher than ever.

From video infrastructure to CDN services, developing both consumer-facing apps and back-end systems, managing content from both the delivery standpoint and the legal and accounting sides, providing analytics and audience measurement, powering the advertising necessary to generate revenue, and supporting customers, the modern media business essentially requires transforming into a tech company or depending on dozens of different vendors to contribute pieces to a very delicate machine.

Whichever way you slice it, this is wildly expensive and time-consuming. In the past, linear television was an exclusive medium precisely because of its high barriers to entry, and web-delivered streaming content was the disruptor by making effective distribution accessible and affordable. Now that streaming has overtaken linear TV, it’s become a much more competitive environment that no longer presents the opportunity it once did. Even existing television and streaming media companies are starting to face the crisis of rising costs, shrinking audiences, and the sudden loss of any revenues that used to come from traditional television.

FreeCast Instant Co-Brand Offers a Solution

One of the biggest drags on the profitability of the industry’s biggest media companies is duplicated infrastructure costs. In the past, becoming a tech company was necessary to offer a streaming product.

However, over the past 10 years, FreeCast has been hard at work building a plug-and-play solution designed to take that challenge off the plate of its partners, big or small. With years of R&D and over $50 million spent on the project, FreeCast has assembled all the technology pieces and vendor relationships necessary to offer a turn-key opportunity.

This means that rather than spend 18 months building infrastructure, any company can spend that time building an audience with a service that can start generating revenue almost immediately.

FreeCast has long positioned itself as an aggregator for consumers, putting everything in one easy-to-access place for consumers. That philosophy goes both ways, with FreeCast also serving as a one-stop-shop for its B2B partners. A company that partners with FreeCast can roll out a service quickly, with a single full launch; no phased rollout, no waiting on key features.

Because FreeCast is already a tech company that has spent a decade on the cutting edge of the streaming space, its partners benefit from that experience. FreeCast’s platform is pre-optimized with adaptive bitrate algorithms, CDN routing optimization, tried and tested device compatibility, and platform-specific certifications covered. The company’s years of industry knowledge means that best practices are built-in, from tech to monetization.

From the economic perspective, FreeCast offers fixed fees and revenue sharing, so the company’s incentives are aligned with its partners’. This allows for effective cross-promotion with no favoritism or conflicts of interest.

With a single platform designed to be turn-key, FreeCast is also the perfect platform for experimentation. Partners can add features, test pricing models, launch new content categories, and put ideas into practice quickly and easily. This also allows FreeCast to keep the platform up to date as technology evolves. New devices are supported, even as platform and security requirements evolve. Major operating system updates or new delivery tech standards are all handled by FreeCast so they never become a worry for partner companies.

The Decisive Business Advantage

By handling the tech piece, FreeCast frees up its partners to do what they do best. Whether that’s creating content or providing a valuable membership program, that’s where their focus and resources are best spent. FreeCast turns a video product into an instant value-add and revenue driver rather than an expense or hassle to support.

For media companies, from the smallest independent creators and local TV stations, all the way up to the largest media empires in the nation, FreeCast changes the dynamics in a positive way. We eliminate the key drivers of cost and drags on profitability: duplicative technology investment and high customer acquisition costs.

For telcos, MDUs, device manufacturers, membership organizations, and any brand that wants to offer their customers a video platform, FreeCast’s Instant Co-Brand is the smartest way to do it. With a fast-to-launch service that almost immediately starts generating revenue, it can be an easy way to add a new revenue stream. For any business that already has a large base of customers, this can very quickly prove highly lucrative.

Since FreeCast has already assembled the technologies, built the platform, and learned the lessons of this rapidly-evolving industry, they’re able to offer the only affordable and low-risk solution in what would otherwise be a highly complex and hyper-competitive market to enter.