Samsung Reveals Its Reach: Free Streaming TV Service Is As Big as the Major Players

Samsung wants to send a message to Hollywood: It is officially a major player in streaming video.

The South Korean tech giant is for the first time releasing user data on its free ad-supported streaming service Samsung TV Plus, disclosing that the FAST service now has 88 million monthly active users (MAUs), and is the number one app on Samsung TVs in the U.S.

Samsung, it should be noted, is the best-selling TV brand in the country, and Samsung TV Plus is baked into every device.

For comparison, the three biggest players in free, ad-supported streaming are Roku Channel, Tubi, and Pluto, and all have MAUs in and around that 80-90 million area, according to disclosures from the companies.

“Everybody had a sense of how important we were as a player in the industry, and that we were, in fact, a large player in the in the industry with significant audience, but nobody really understood or knew how to dimensionalize that, and these were questions we were consistently getting,” says Salek Brodsky, senior VP and GM of Samsung TV Plus, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “So we’re obviously incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved to date, and we felt it an opportune moment to actually convert that sense into something that was a bit more tangible and real.”

The engagement on Samsung TV Plus is less clear, though Brodsky says that his video service is working. “We actually do have the most time spent with TV plus of any app on the on the platform,” he says.

Nielsen’s Gauge, however, frequently includes Roku Channel, Tubi, and Pluto, though Samsung TV Plus has not cracked the list as a breakout just yet, though the company says it has seen an “over 50% increase in global viewership” year over year.

“Advertisers that have been working with us have been pretty clear about the understanding of the scale that we’ve been able to deliver them on a campaign by campaign basis around targeting,” says Michael Scott, VP and head of ad sales and operations for Samsung Ads.

Now that it has scale and growth, the Samsung executives say they are executing a gameplan to continue that momentum. Samsung TV Plus combines live and free FAST channels from media partners like NBCUniversal, Disney, Fox, Paramount and A+E Networks, alongside exclusive channels from the likes of Conan O’Brien and CJ ENM.

When we first got into the business, we were knocking on lots of doors amongst the content community, and they were just not opening. Folks had not yet really understood or embraced FAST as a strategic and meaningful mechanism to actually get their great programming in front of consumers,” Brodsky says. “Where we sit today is actually in the exact opposite place where the content community understands and appreciates what it is that we can do in terms of both exposing their IP and, of course, monetizing it. And the problem that we have is not one of having access to incredibly high quality, premium programming, but actually enabling that programming to reach the right consumer at the right time.”

And for the time being, the company thinks it has the runway to build a meaningful advertising business, with tech at the center of it.

“By and large, we’re over indexing on 18 to 49, that key adult demo that most advertisers are interested in. We’re also over indexing on prime time and late night viewing, so the core times as well as the core audiences,” Scott says. “And then the other thing is that we’re really deploying is using our data to help around contextual advertising, contextual targeting. I think there’s a lot of white space there, and a lot of advertiser need around content as an important signal in the advertising experience.”