Two Philo Execs Discuss FAST Channels

A television with the Philo logo on the screen

Philo, 2026

Philo has always been a fascinating live TV service to me.

Before the major live TV platforms were offering a smaller bundle of channels, Philo put together a bundle of primarily entertainment live TV channels, at a cost well below what a full live TV bundle costs each month.

In the past few years, Philo has added a substantial bundle of FAST (free, ad-supported television) channels to its subscription package and has also rolled out a free TV offering that allows users to watch those FAST networks without needing to add the paid subscription tier.

I wanted to learn more about how that business worked and I recently spoke with Sarah Wong, Chief of Staff and General Manager, FAST at Philo, and Edward King, Chief Product Officer at Philo.

We discussed the quickly changing FAST market, how adding the channels has helped build Philo’s paid product, as well as some of the challenges of making it all work seamlessly.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity (mostly mine):

Sarah, can you talk a little bit about the strategic role that the FAST channels play with Philo? Companies are in this space for a lot of different reasons. So why does it make sense for Philo?

Sarah: Early on, we were just trying to understand the free side of the business and what FAST channels meant. And we already had a lot of great relationships with our existing programmers that also had FAST channels available.

So when I first joined, it was already a concept at Philo, where we decided, “Why don’t we try this out?” We understand that our Philo subscribers do watch free channels elsewhere. Why not integrate free channels into the Philo ecosystem?

We started incorporating some of these FAST channels into our existing paid subscriber offerings and quickly realized that there’s a lot of momentum there. There’s a lot of engagement in these free channels. Not only do they play prior seasons of some of the series that our audience is already engaging with, but there’s also a lot of one-offs and other tangential titles that they’re watching.

That success prompted a discussion about expanding FAST elsewhere. Not just to our existing subscribers. We also suspected it might help with churned subscribers as well. Are people who had previously subscribed to Philo coming back to Philo to watch the free channels? Then they can be back in the Philo ecosystem again. And that proved very successful.

When Edward joined, we really decided to make an investment on our free business. To make sure that it’s easily available to users who are outside of Philo’s paid subscriber base right now.

And that brought up some interesting questions. Are people who have previously subscribed to Philo coming back to watch the free content? If so, is there a way to convince them to be in the Philo ecosystem again?

We know they are engaging with free channels elsewhere and free content elsewhere. So why not come to Philo where we have both a paid subscription service and free together? And that idea informed our free TV philosophy.

It has gained a lot of momentum in the last 12 to 15 months. And obviously, with Edward here, we’re just very fortunate to have an expert on the free side to really help with our product.

Edward, Sarah talked about the fact that FAST channels are available a lot of different places. So for Philo, how do you differentiate what you’re doing from everybody else? Or is it just a situation of you’re hoping to capture people who might be checking Philo out anyway?

Edward King: I think we have two advantages over other platforms. First, we have a DVR built in, which most of the other free platforms don’t, which means that there’s certain content that you can watch on channels that’s not available on other free apps.

And for some people, they don’t want to wait till 7:00 pm on a Thursday to watch that show. But with the DVR we have, you can set it to record the show, come back and watch it at the time that it’s good for you.

The other thing we have is content that’s not available on other free platforms. Because we have all this premium paid content, a lot of the time the content partners will give us access to earlier seasons of the same program, and they may not be generally looking to monetize on the free platforms. But they’re happy to give it to us because you can watch the free program and then upgrade to watch the later seasons of the show on our platform.

The Industry Problem With Repetitive Ads

One of the things that I’ve learned about the FAST industry is there are a several overriding challenges, one of which is just the advertising side of it. There’s a lot of repetitive ads, there are a lot of empty spots, and when I talk people who are just civilians – for lack of a better description – about FAST channels, that’s the biggest issue they have with it. “Oh, I’m looking at this commercial 18 times in a half hour.”

How do you try and tackle that with Philo’s FAST offerings? And I know it’s not all on you, it’s a partnership with the people who are running the channels.

Edward King: We’re doing a lot of work right now, but it drives me crazy personally and it’s a problem in the industry. Unfortunately, the way the ad insertion works, we’re getting ads from lots of different places and they don’t clearly identify what are the same creatives.

And one of the most common problems we see is when there’ll be two ads that look almost identical, but they’ll be slightly different. So there’ll be one that’s maybe like a 15-second version and another that’s a 30-second version, and they don’t tell us this is the same creative.

So they both come in, and all of these systems are automated. To the systems, they look like different ads and then they end up being played in the same pod.

What we’re currently doing to try and fix that is using AI to actually look at those ads and identify that these two ads, even though they say they’re different ads, they’re actually the same ad. It might be 15 seconds and 30 seconds, but it’s the same scenes, the shots in the ads are identical, it’s the same product and everything else.

So I’m hoping fairly soon we’ll be able to use the new AI computer vision techniques to like identify those ads and remove them. And then you’ll see less of the competitive, repetitive ads.

Let me follow up with you on that, Edward. I’ve noticed that Philo has been rolling out what are basically house ads. I’m not quite sure what you just call them, but these ads just mention Philo and they include a bit of music. Do you use these house ads to help deal with some of those repetition issues, or are they serving a different purpose?

Edward King: To be honest, the main reason we do that is to promote shows on Philo. We want people watching to be aware of all the content we have. Sometimes we use it to promote other features. It doesn’t really help that much with the repetitive ad problem.

You know, when you have free content, you are required to have ad breaks in it. You can’t say “Oh, we didn’t have any available ads,” and leave the content empty.
So the house ads are one way to make sure that when we have a contract saying we will place ads in this content, we can guarantee there’ll be something there.

Generally, though, you know, we have enough ads to put in the breaks. But so the main reason we’re doing house ads, it’s not the repetitive ads. It’s more just because we were genuinely trying to promote different shows and features on our platform.

Sarah Wong: And I think one of the beauty of our business is that we also have our paid offering. So we have a bunch of new free users coming in. So we use some of the ads inventory to help them understand what Philo paid offering is as well and what kind of premium content they will be getting there.

As this has been rolling out and you’re looking at the data and what people are watching, have there been any surprises – positive or negative – where you think, “Oh, we didn’t realize people were going to be using it this way?

Sarah Wong: I think in terms of content, we definitely see a lot of similarities between our paid subscribers and our free users. They enjoy laid back content, female skewing content, true crime. I would say some surprises are definitely there. They’re definitely into a lot of variety shows, game shows and lifestyle. So those are the things that we’ll be investing in the future. But I would say that in terms of both audiences as well as content preferences right now, we’re seeing very, very similar audiences with paid and free content.

My understanding is that generally speaking, show specific FAST channels do better than themed ones such as “action movie,” etc. And do you find that to be the case with Philo users as well?

Sarah Wong: Yes. You know, I think in terms of just the stickiness of the content, definitely the shows with multiple seasons, you know, multiple episodes in a season tend to be stickier. You know, we definitely see a lot more engagement there. We tend to offer a variety of both show specific channels as well as movies. And we actually started investing in AVOD content, in terms of VOD licensing from different studios. We have tested out movies recently, and we’re still taking a lot of learnings from there. I would say movies are definitely great in terms of organic acquisition. But then we’re trying to make sure that they’re watching series as well so that we can get the engagement piece of it.

The Challenges Of Integrating Free And Paid TV Content

Edward, it’s a complicated mix that you’re trying to balance. And just from your perspective, what’s the biggest challenge of integrating all of this?

Edward King: I think the biggest challenge is balancing the FAST channels with our subscription business.

So when you have a new viewer coming in, you have to try and understand what are they looking for? Are they looking for the free product or the paid product? If you just let them come straight in and go to the free product, then it might take them a long time to discover the paid product and upgrade. And generally, the subscription product is still our main business.

So we want to really focus on them. And then with the free product, we need to make sure that people who are specifically looking for it can find it. Then once they’re in it, make sure that they can easily find the user flows to upgrade.

So if they search for a show, maybe the first season is free.But when they get to the end of the first season, then there’ll be a very clear path to upgrade. And it also explains then why should they upgrade?

It might be they don’t want to upgrade just to watch the rest of that one show. You need to also show them that there’s other content that they’re likely to be interested in. Plus, you get unlimited DVR if you upgrade. On the free product, you only get DVR for 30 days. And so we’re selling them all the benefits for upgrading if they try and do that.

And likewise, if someone downgrades, and we do have people that come and they want to pay to watch their favorite show when it’s in season. But then when the season’s over, they’ll want to downgrade to the free product.

We need to make sure that that’s a smooth process, too, and that when they come back on their next visit, they’re not blocked by the paywall that told us they want to stop their subscription. So we don’t want to block them when they try and come back the next time. But then when their favorite show comes back again, then they’ll want to upgrade again to watch the latest season of it or maybe the latest season of another show that they’re interested in.

So it’s really having very smooth flows for upgrading, downgrading and those first-time viewers coming in where you’re trying to figure out, are they looking for the free product or the paid product?

Sarah, building on what Edward said, what is the challenge of letting people know what’s available? I’ll talk to people who are familiar with Philo, but they don’t understand that you have a free platform as well. And the free channels are also available to users who have a paid plan. What is the marketing like when you’re trying to say, “Hey, this is what we’re doing. It’s different than what you’ll find on Pluto or Fubo.”

Sarah Wong: I think it goes a lot to what Edward was saying about really providing that transparency and value proposition.

It comes up in terms of something like if you’re wanting to watch The Hunger Games. You’ll see it’s available on all of these platforms, including Philo. So when those people come here, they’re interested in watching it.

So it’s our job to onboard them and educate them about what Philo is. We try to make sure we position them in terms of making sure they understand there is free content, but then there’s also an upgrade available for what that premium content is.

And I think it’s also making sure that there’s a lot of transparency and visibility in terms of what’s available to the free users. So now when they click on Friends or any other show that’s available for free, it’s very clearly marked on there what’s available to the free users. But then here’s all of these other titles and other content that’s available from our premium pay subscription.

I think that’s how we build word of mouth. Just making sure our free content appears in some of the searches people are doing, making sure we’re in the articles that other people are creating, getting users in the door, and then it’s out job to educate them.

Edwards King: Something else I would add is when it comes to challenges, within our product, we can control the interface and try and make everything as clear as possible. Unfortunately, outside of our products on some of our platforms, the big platforms around like Fire TV and Roku, they have designed their ecosystems assuming that apps are either fully paid or fully free.

And so we have to work with them to try and say, “Hey, we’re a hybrid app, we have both. So when someone goes to the app store page, there needs to be an entry point for the free app and the paid app.” And that takes a lot longer because it’s not just like we’re making our own decisions. We have to meet with our partners and explain that we’re a hybrid app and ask them for clear entry points to each. And that can take several months to kind of work through their product roadmaps. It’s a slower process than if we’re just building things in-house.

The Importance Of A Great User Interface (UI)

How important is Philo’s UI to this entire discussion? Because you want the user experience to be as pleasant as possible.You want people to be able to find stuff. Philo lets you favorite FAST channels, which is helpful. But, how important is that aspect of it? And where do you see Philo moving in the next, six months, a year, two years?

Edward King: I think the UI is very important. And we’re catering to two different audiences. We’ve got one audience that likes VOD and they’re used to Netflix-style grids. So you go to the homepage and it’s based on the old shelves at movie stores where you just have lots of tiles and you can scroll up and down and figure out what title you want to watch. So that’s one type of viewing behavior.

Then another type is the kind of people are used to cable and they’re looking for the EPG and they want to come in and see the TV guide. So if you look at our product, we have both interfaces. You can have the VOD grid and the EPG guide.

But we also think there’s an opportunity to build something that’s kind of a hybrid of the two where you can, especially with machine learning, you can try and understand what mood is someone in? Are they looking more for like a lean in? DO they want to pick something to watch or do they want to kind of lean back and let us decide for them and have something playing in the background? So I think that’s where we’re really focusing our efforts on the user interface. To merge the grid and the TV guide into a seamless user experience.

Sarah, Philo is not the biggest player in this space, you know, obviously. If you’re, for instance, the Roku Channel, you can somewhat bludgeon people into giving up their FAST channels for you. If you’re dealing with Warner Brothers Discovery, they have got a bunch of FAST channels.They sometimes play hardball about what they want to give and don’t want to give. So what is your case to a bigger company to say, look, this is an audience you want, we can deliver this to you?

Sarah Wong: I think you speak right to the heart of some of the challenges that we face. Obviously, we obviously we do have difficulty, especially with known players that might not know exactly who Philo audience is.

But we’re also lucky enough that we have established relationships, with our existing programmers like Paramount, Warner Brothers, A&E and AMC that we have a paid relationship with. So they understand that who our audience is and what type of content is good for us.

I think one thing that we do, and I credit our content Business Development team for this, is that we try to find a lot of independent distributors, things that might not hit the radar for the Roku Channel, per se. And unlike some of those other companies, we have a free side as well as a paid subscription business.

So I think that is one of our bigger selling points. We are not just exposing them to free, we’re exposing them to a more valuable subscriber base as well. And we have definitely seen success on that front.