European streaming television service Rakuten TV has unveiled a new service that will allow content rights holders to easily spin up new free, ad-supported TV (FAST) channels and apps, and scale their offerings across different connected TV products.
The product, called Rakuten TV Enterprise Services, was announced at MIPCOM Cannes on Tuesday. Rakuten TV Enterprise Services allows content rights holders to launch their own FAST channels and take advantage of monetization tools that support both ad-supported video on-demand and TV on-demand models.
Rakuten TV Enterprise Services doesn’t limit itself to just Rakuten TV, one of the leading FAST platforms in Europe — it also works with major connected TV operating systems, including Samsung Tizen OS, LG WebOS, Android TV (Google TV), Apple’s iOS, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and others, the company affirmed.
The launch of Rakuten TV Enterprise Services builds on Rakuten TV’s 15 years of experience in the FAST and AVOD market, executives said at the conference on Tuesday. The platform is designed for a company that has “lots of content but doesn’t know how to organize it, doesn’t have the technical capability to connect to the main platforms and doesn’t know how to best monetize it,” Rakuten TV CEO and President Cédric Dufour told the entertainment trade publication Variety.
Rakuten TV Enterprise Services is limited in that it doesn’t help content holders secure distribution deals with FAST and AVOD platforms — they will still need to do that on their own — but once those deals are in place, the product will help with the technical and analytical ends of those partnerships, providing data and insight into which content works on certain platforms, and allowing them to unlock monetization opportunities accordingly.
Dufour said that limitation is actually an advantage, because it means Rakuten TV Enterprise Services will work beyond Europe, where Rakuten TV is one of the leading FAST platforms on the market. It can work in other markets, too, including North America, where Rakuten TV has more competition from the likes of Paramount’s Pluto TV, Comcast and Charter’s service Xumo Play, Fox Corporation’s Tubi and similar offerings from Amazon, MyBundle, FreeCast and others.
“We’re not just offering a technical solution to our partners; we’re bringing 15 years of experience in terms of adapting to our customers’ needs,” Dufour said. “We understand that needs are different depending on the type of content and the profile of the clients. We know that the UI needs to be specific to each partner and the users it’s being designed for. Even if a partner were to ask for something we don’t have, we have in-house developers that give us the autonomy and the agility to develop new features extremely quickly.”
The cost of Rakuten TV Enterprise Services will be determined on a case-by-case basis, depending on the needs of each client, Dufour said. Smaller clients will likely be charged a nominal fee for access to the tool suite, while larger clients with more-robust content libraries will likely have to split their revenue with the company.
