Producer/distributor Fremantle has unveiled a partnership with production company Nacelle to represent its FAST channel – Comedy Dynamics. The RTL-owned company said the deal “brings together our scale and expertise in the FAST space with Comedy Dynamics’ best in class comedy programming”.
Comedy Dynamics offers 1,000 hours of library content and is the number one indie distributor of stand-up comedy, according to Fremantle. The Nacelle library includes comedians such as Ali Wong, Jim Gaffigan, Tiffany Haddish, Tom Segura, and Jeff Dunham. Currently, Comedy Dynamics receives tens of millions of views across all its channels, which are active on platforms such as Roku, Pluto TV, Samsung, and LG. The partnership with Fremantle will bolster Comedy Dynamics’ audience base, with aim to scale out to further markets in North America, as well as internationally.
Fremantle said it will provide support to scale the Comedy Dynamics channel. This includes “expertise from the company’s global sales teams and channel marketing, programming, data, partnership and ad sales teams, which will provide the best practices for consumer engagement, marketing and performance optimisation”.
Laura Florence, SVP global channels, Fremantle, said: “This is a fantastic new deal for our global channels team and marks the very first of this kind of partnership. Nacelle is a great partner for us with its impressive, growing library of content, which we look forward to bolstering with our global teams and expertise at Fremantle.”
Nacelle CEO Brian Volk-Weiss added: “We’re excited to be partnering with Fremantle. This partnership helps provide free top-tier stand-up comedy to the masses!”
Fremantle’s channels business is one of the most extensive within the industry. All told it currently operates over 20 FAST channels, across 18 territories and 25 platforms.
The notion of major distributors representing FAST channels on behalf of third parties is still relatively novel – with most IP owners focusing first on their own content as the basis of new channels. But as the market becomes more competitive, it’s likely that companies with large FAST channel portfolios will increasingly seek to move into third party representation – exactly as they do with traditional programme distribution. For FAST channels operating primarily in their home markets, this kind of partnership with give them access to global sales & marketing resources that they don’t have in-house.
