The Transformative Opportunity for Global Telecoms

The internet, and thus connectivity to it, are essential to modern life. This is both a result and a driver of trillions of dollars spent by global telecoms and infrastructure providers. Access to the web now reaches from the densest urban areas to the most remote rural locations, across all terrains, and all levels of the economic spectrum. Web-based services have become integral parts of every day life.

In recent years, internet connectivity has begun to consume what was once an equally important medium: television. Video entertainment is now primarily delivered over-the-top, as web-based services rather than broadcast or traditional pay TV from cable or satellite.

But while data connectivity infrastructure is now tasked with delivering television, internet service providers have not shared in the economic benefits of that transition. To an extent this has certainly increased the demand for bandwidth, but where video was once a profitable product for cable companies, the move to over-the-top distribution risks leaving internet providers as “dumb pipes” for data while other firms cash in on the economic activity enabled by connectivity.

Since the cord-cutting trend began more than a decade ago, this was widely speculated to be the ultimate fate of cable companies. But fast-forward to the present, and these very firms are uniquely positioned to solve a major problem with streaming television and profit handsomely from doing so.

Consumers Want a Streaming Solution, ISPs Can Provide It

The defining characteristic, and arguably defining challenge, of the shift to streaming has been fragmentation. What was once provided by a single pay TV subscription has now been spread across dozens of apps, frustrating consumers who must now juggle multiple subscriptions and a disjointed experience. Streaming costs have skyrocketed, with just handful of streaming services now adding up to the notoriously high pay TV bills they were supposed to replace.

Consumers have complained of this for years now, and the mess is costing programmers money. While each of the big media empires expected to cash in on the same monthly revenue Netflix and other early streamers were making, instead they got super-charged churn, high customer acquisition costs, and a hyper-competitive landscape where making money is nearly impossible. Everyone would benefit from a unified experience, and those best to provider are the same companies that unified television before.

A pre-requisite for accessing streaming video is internet connectivity, so connectivity providers necessarily sit everywhere this opportunity lies. While the big cable and telco providers come to mind first, just as the ability to watch video has expanded beyond the living room television, so too has the opportunity here. Any connectivity provider is in the right position: cable companies, telcos (whether they’ve ever provided TV service or not), fixed wireless, satellite, and fiber internet providers, mobile and MVNO service providers, and more. This even includes alternative intermediary providers like apartment buildings, condominiums, student housing providers, the hospitality and healthcare industries, and others.

The PaaS-Enabled Monetization Layer

While internet providers own valuable customer relationships, they’re missing out on participating in all the economic activity that happens through that connection. In the case of streaming, there appears no easy way to get in on the action. Consumers are already frustrated by too many apps, and developing a new one, even with an aggregation approach in lieu of licensing content, would be prohibitively expensive.

A platform-as-a-service (PaaS) on the other hand, offers unique advantages for this exact scenario. The technology is already built, and relying on a shared platform and infrastructure means all the advantage of scale are available, even to smaller individual providers. But despite so much shared under the hood to make the economics work, each ISP can have its own branded experience for the consumer, the same way a single engine can be found in cars from a range of different brands.

This also solves a problem for the consumer: it creates a familiar, universal experience that’s available across all their devices, across different locations, and offers access to the whole universe of free and paid streaming content. If an ISP, housing provider, or device manufacturer offers this as a tool and benefit to their customers, those customers are likely to embrace that consistent experience over the app-diving and subscription management mess they currently deal with and complain about.

Unlike direct-to-consumer streaming products, which are notorious for churn and having to reacquire the same customers again and again at significant cost, this PaaS approach binds the offering to a much stickier service, like a bandwidth subscription or even one’s housing. This puts customer acquisition costs near zero and keeps churn to a minimal level. Consumers may binge and bounce from streaming services, but it’s much less often that they switch internet providers or move to a new home.

To understand the value of this, one need only look to the attention focused on the “TV OS Wars.” Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion, not because it wants a piece of Roku’s device sales or ad revenues, but because of their OS’s strategic position as the front door for consumers to access streaming video, which they do for approximately 2.78 hours per day.

Roku is used in about 100 million households, controlling a sizeable chunk of the roughly 650 million smart televisions in the world. While this is significant, Roku and its TV OS competitors miss out on viewing that occurs via mobile devices, PCs, game consoles, and any other television hardware a consumer may use that features a different OS. Compare that with over 7 billion mobile devices alone, and over 6 billion internet connections.

Tapping In to the 2.78 Hours of Daily Viewing

The economic opportunity in FreeCast’s Platform-as-a-Service is that it creates a powerful new revenue stream, that’s virtually turn-key and synergizes with an internet provider’s existing offerings. FreeCast gives ISP customers a single-source streaming destination with FAST channels, free AVOD options, and access to subscription and pay-per-view libraries. As consumers utilize these options, FreeCast shares ad and commission revenue with the distribution partner that originated the eyeballs.

From a rural telco with a few hundred subscribers, to an international communications giant, the cost to integrate FreeCast’s PaaS is minimal, and the service is revenue positive from day one.

The average consumer spends 2.78 hours per day watching video. A number like that may seem small, but multiply that by a firm’s total subscriber base, and then by the number of days a typical customer remains subscribed, and you end up with a large figure that can be a significant multiplier for even modest ad revenues.

The starting point for FreeCast’s PaaS is a boost to average revenue per user (ARPU) and lifetime value of a customer, but it’s easy to see how the opportunity, properly leveraged, could really add a new dimension to an ISP’s business.

All this is before you even begin to consider the value add to the ISP’s customer. A positive streaming experience, branded by the internet provider, can increase customer satisfaction with the service and build the value of the brand.

A Global Game Changer

In so many ways, this is an expansive opportunity. There are already familiar firms that could begin benefitting from this approach. But it also opens the door for new firms to get in on a revenue stream they wouldn’t have otherwise had access too, like WISPs and housing providers. This solution also has global potential.

Outside the US and Western Europe, both traditional pay TV and premium streaming are less common. But internet connectivity and FAST services have been growing fast. The PaaS solution works just as well, if not even better, in serving these communities.

In territories with economic or geographic challenges, the wide availability of smart phones and mobile data service make a telecom-provided PaaS the ideal video delivery system for the future. It does not require an additional expensive infrastructure build-out, nor domestic firms with a streaming technology stack like those of the big western media firms.

Small scale local broadcasters can plug in to FreeCast’s PaaS and enjoy both effective local distribution with advantages over over-the-air TV, and expand their reach to international markets as well. Yet again the benefits for all compound. This gives the whole diaspora of immigrants, expats, and family members abroad access to programming from their home country, in their own language. Likewise, this gives US programmers easy access to new global markets.

This has already been demonstrated through FreeCast’s recent launch in the Caribbean, where broadcast has traditionally been the main television technology. A traditional cable service wouldn’t be viable on many of these island nations, but wireless service and smartphones are ubiquitous, making direct-to-mobile (D2M) a well-suited technology for powering the next generation of modern streaming television across the region.

At the global scale, the power of the PaaS model only grows stronger, and the math gets even more attractive. Unlike other solutions, FreeCast has already assembled the tech stack, and makes it available as a shared infrastructure, keeping the cost to the enterprise user minimal, and giving FreeCast an advantage over even tech and media giants that might attempt to build something similar on their own. The product is less costly to deploy than solutions requiring extensive physical infrastructure or proprietary software, meaning less risk to adopt and higher margins if successful.

Based on recent filings, FreeCast is well funded in order to provide this service at scale and maintain it for the long-term, having recently raised $23 million via private placement and with access to a $50 million line of credit per recent filings.