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Tony Robbins wears many hats in a typical day: bestselling author, psychiatrist, motivational speaker, business strategist and life skills coach. Being a TV star wasn’t on his personal to-do list — until he got a cold call a few months ago from Dan Cohen.
Cohen, chief content licensing officer for Paramount Global, had an intriguing pitch for Robbins: How about partnering with the studio on the launch of a FAST channel?
FAST channels (the acronym stands for “free advertising-supported television”) are a hybrid of linear and streaming TV. They’re available on streaming platforms such as Roku, Pluto TV and Amazon Prime Channels as well as smart TVs manufactured by Samsung, LG and Sony. But instead of offering program tiles for viewing on an on-demand basis, à la Netflix, FAST channels look like a traditional linear channel with a schedule of programs that run 24/7.
Cohen’s raison d’être at Paramount Global is to find ways for the studio to make more money with the TV shows and movies it produces. He’s also been active in recruiting third-party distribution deals, i.e., working with independent producers to give a small player the benefit of a big studio’s sales and marketing infrastructure. Robbins stood out to Cohen as a prime target for a FAST channel because the self-help master is a brand name unto himself after decades in the public eye. He’s known for filling sports arenas with his motivational speaking tours. He’s hosted about a zillion seminars on various personal improvement topics for nearly 50 years. Robbins has thousands of hours of video in his vault — most of which has rarely, if ever, been seen on traditional TV.
Tony Robbins with Paramount Global’s Dan Cohen
Courtesy of Paramount Global
“You need at least a few hundred hours of content available to launch a FAST channel, because it needs to be refreshed,” Cohen tells Variety. “There are a lot of great personalities out there, but they don’t have their own content. Tony has both. And he has a global following, so we very quickly realized that this channel could have global distribution.”
FAST channel owners make money by receiving a predetermined percentage of advertising sales generated by the channel. Robbins will own the channel; Paramount will receive a distribution fee from him for handling distribution, marketing and technical support. Ad sales are handled by the individual streaming platforms. This is a departure for a major studio like Paramount — one that reflects TV’s wild and woolly new world order.
Launch partners for the Robbins channel include Roku, Pluto TV (part of Paramount Global), Prime Video and Comcast’s Plex. From owning his video outright to having a worldwide following to addressing subjects with broad appeal, Robbins is as pitch-perfect for the FAST treatment as it gets. The channel is targeting a summer launch.
“I don’t want us to do 50 FAST channels. I want us to do a small number of really good channels that we believe can cut through,” Cohen says. “This channel will be profitable in year one.”
