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As TV’s programming budgets shrink and multiplatform needs widen, content creators are emerging as the potential solution to both problems. A new FAST channel, Creator Television, offers one vision of how the TV/creator collaborative model might work a little closer to Earth than the MrBeast/Amazon-size deals that broke the ice between the two worlds last year.
Launched in January, Creator Television is currently in the FAST channel lineups of Sling’s Freestream and Plex, according to Joe Ochoa, its co-founder and GM. Ochoa, whose background includes production stints with MTV’s College Network and NBC, and Charlie Ibarra, co-founder and head of content at the channel, began developing the channel over two years ago under parent company Sabio, a CTV advertising platform.
Ochoa says Sabio launched the channel in part to provide owned and operated ad inventory for itself in the crowded CTV ad market (he and Aziz Rahimtoola, Sabio’s CEO and co-founder, had a production company together a decade ago).
A second impetus, Ochoa says, is that FAST platforms themselves wanted to tap the creator world. “When we were talking to the FAST platforms, we were also making sure that we were filling gaps in their content strategy,” he says. “Comedy, light-hearted content, was always something they were really open to, especially if it came from the creator community.”
FAST platforms keen on original content also value the younger, more diverse audiences that creators draw on their social accounts. “It’s tough to do that, and we all know that creators have built these communities