First look at Rakuten TV's European platform data
Plays, session time and return rate give completely different reads on the same FAST channel. Here's the data, market by market.
Most published research on FAST and AVOD in Europe is consumer survey data. Valuable in its way but it records what viewers say they do, not what platforms actually see them doing. Real consumption numbers, broken down by market, by title and by performance metric, almost never appear in a public forum.
Rakuten TV Enterprise changed that for one session on June 9 during which Maria Chacon Brito, Head of FAST Channels Partnerships at Rakuten TV, put the company’s own platform consumption numbers on screen for the first time. What viewers actually watch across FAST and AVOD, broken down by market, by genre and by 3 distinct performance metrics. Some of it confirmed what the industry assumes, a fair amount didn’t.
This edition covers that session in full as well as two research pieces Rakuten TV drop: “The FAST Advantage” on European consumer attitudes to free streaming and “Beyond the Break” on CTV advertising. I’ll draw on both where they add to the platform data.
Today at a glance:
Equal on time, miles apart on behaviour
What Europe actually watches
The 3-question framework for FAST: What drives viewers in? What makes viewers stay? What brings viewers back?
BONUS: Instead of my crooked pictures from the event, the team at Rakuten TV was kind enough to share the slides with me and so with you too.
Equal on time, miles apart on behaviour
They look balanced on paper. FAST accounts for 54% of total viewing time on Rakuten TV while AVOD accounts for 46%. Close enough to call even but the behaviour behind that number is completely different.
FAST generated 356 million plays in the period while AVOD generated 66 million. FAST is where people browse: only 19% of FAST plays run past 3 minutes. On AVOD, 73% stay beyond 3 minutes. The average qualified session is 37 minutes on FAST, 52 on AVOD. FAST is where viewers arrive without a plan while AVOD is where they go with one.
AVOD is also heavily skewed toward film with 86% of viewing going to movies, 14% to series (the library is deeper with 6K+ movies live while the series library is still growing with 700% episodes). Engagement on both is almost identical, 72% for movies and 73% for series, which means once someone picks something on AVOD, they commit regardless of the format.
This matters for how you programme and monetise each format. An AVOD viewer who sits through 52 minutes of a film behaves very differently from a FAST viewer who dips in and out. Treating them identically is where the revenue gap opens up.
The FAST Advantage consumer survey puts a number on the broader shift. 80.1% of European viewers now treat FAST as a main or alternative way to watch television, and 93.7% watch it on the main TV screen in the living room. FAST has stopped being background noise, it’s primary viewing.
What Europe actually watches
Drama, thriller and action fill the top 3 in every AVOD market: UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Comedy and adventure at 4 and 5, barely any variation by country.
Go one level deeper, to the actual titles, and it gets even more interesting.
