All-British FAST Channels Launch on Amazon FreeVee

It's time for us to talk about FAST channels. FAST is an acronym; it stands for Free Ad-supported Streaming Television. Free ad-supported TV? Call me old fashioned, or at least born in the 20th century, but that sounds familiar, almost like... TV. And it is sort of like the old broadcast TV, but not quite. There are no antennas to attach tin foil to, analog, digital, or otherwise, and no dials to touch. Apps are involved, as is downloading them and then scrolling down a little lineup of boxes to select the streaming service de jour. However, once you open a FAST app, things get really old school quickly.

There's no credit card involved, no monthly fee; there's no endless lines of tiles of shows you may or may not have heard of. Instead, there's the old TV guide of channels, though these channels are not NBC, ABC, CBS, and the like. These are channels dedicated to shows, endlessly showing season upon season, episode upon episode of your favorite show. At first, most of these were American shows, as these were American-owned FAST apps. But ever since Paramount's PlutoTV got ahold of Classic Doctor Who, BBC Food, BBC Home, and a bit of Sky News to have a small segment of British Channels, it's only been a matter of time before other streamers caught on.

Amazon was always the obvious one to start bringing over major titles wholesale for its FreeVee FAST channels, quietly adding channels dedicated to Midsomer Murders, Antiques Roadshow UK, Grand Designs, plus The Goes Wrong Show, The Inbetweeners, and Paramount+'s new series The Flatshare without telling anyone. But now they're going all in with a big announcement that they're adding a Gardening with Monty Don channel, a Great British Menu channel, and a Fifth Gear channel, the series that Top Gear always wished it was. Not to be outdone, PlutoTV announced that the Jamie Oliver Channel, which is already on FreeVee, will also run on PlutoTV.