How to launch a FAST channel
Most guides to this describe five neat steps. In practice the work does not arrive in that order, two of the steps take months of someone else's calendar, and the step everyone underestimates is the one that never ends. Here is the sequence as it actually runs.
1. Establish what you can legally distribute
Before anything else: what content do you hold streaming rights to, in which territories, for how long? Archive libraries are often licensed for broadcast but not for ad-supported streaming, and territory splits are the normal case rather than the exception. If you are licensing wire video from AP, AFP or Reuters, the agreement will be specific about the platforms and regions it covers.
This step is boring and it is the one that kills launches late. A distribution deal signed against rights you turn out not to have is an expensive conversation.
2. Decide what the channel actually is
Platforms are no longer short of channels — there are around 1,900 of them and the number keeps climbing. What gets a slot is a channel that is legibly about something and can plausibly run forever. "Our archive" is not a channel. "Classic rally racing, 24/7" is.
Programmers think in terms of a schedule grid: what plays at 7am, what plays at 9pm, what the loop length is, how often it refreshes. Having an answer to that before the pitch changes how the pitch goes.
3. Get a distribution agreement
This is the long pole. You are asking a platform for shelf space in front of its audience, and the terms are commercial: typically a revenue share against advertising sold in your hours, sometimes with a minimum commitment, almost always with a launch date attached.
Expect months rather than weeks, and expect to be asked what your supply looks like — not just what you have, but what keeps arriving. Some owners go through an aggregator that already holds platform relationships rather than approaching each platform directly; that trades margin for speed and is frequently the right call for a first channel.
4. Appoint a playout partner
Something has to originate the channel: run the schedule, insert advertising, produce the signal and the guide data the platform ingests. That is a playout service — Amagi, Wurl and Frequency are among the established ones — and it is a separate contract from the platform deal.
Their technical requirements are what your delivered files have to satisfy, so get the delivery spec early. It determines encoding settings, how ad breaks must be signalled, and what metadata travels with each asset.
5. Fill the schedule. Then keep filling it.
Here is where launches actually fail. Producing a strong first week is a project. Producing week fifty-two is an operation, and it needs to happen at a cost that a revenue share on $12–25 CPMs can carry.
Teams routinely staff for the launch and then discover the run rate. A news or news-adjacent channel is the sharpest version of this problem, because the content expires: yesterday's package is not merely stale, it is actively wrong, so there is no reusable library to fall back on.
Where the time really goes
- Rights review — weeks, and mostly waiting on other people's lawyers.
- Distribution deal — months. Start it first; everything else can run in parallel.
- Playout onboarding — weeks, and gated on your files passing their QC. First deliveries are almost never accepted first time.
- Daily production — forever. This is the line item to model honestly before signing a launch date.
Where MediaBlaze fits
MediaBlaze addresses step five. It takes wire video you already licence, or your own footage, and produces finished segments — script, voiceover, assembly, ad-break marking and delivery to your playout partner — with an editor approving each one before it goes. It is running today behind a live sports and business news channel on LG Channels across seven European territories, delivering into Amagi CLOUDPORT.