How to Get Your FAST Channel Carried on Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel

By Sampath Mallidi, CEO of Revidd · Last updated June 2026

FAST channel distribution is a business-development process, not a self-serve upload. To get carried on Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, or The Roku Channel, you pitch a programmer at each platform, sign a carriage and revenue-share deal, then deliver a 24/7 broadcast-grade HLS feed with cleared rights, a machine-readable EPG, and SCTE-35 ad markers. Carriage is granted, not bought.

That last point trips up most broadcasters. There is no public "submit your channel" button on these services. Each one has a content partnerships team that decides what gets a slot, and they say no far more than they say yes. This guide covers what carriage actually means, how the deal and rev share work, the prerequisites you have to meet before anyone will talk to you, and the realistic timeline. It is written for content owners in the US and across the 15 countries Revidd serves: faith networks, sports rights holders, regional TV stations, and diaspora channels with a library and a reason to go linear.

TL;DR

• Carriage is a deal, not an upload. You negotiate a slot with each platform's content partnerships team. Most pitches get rejected.

• Rev share is the standard model. The platform sells some or all of the ad inventory and splits revenue with you. Splits vary and are negotiated, not posted.

• You need three things before pitching: fully cleared rights for every minute, a broadcast-grade 24/7 feed (HLS, adaptive bitrate, SCTE-35 ad markers), and a machine-readable EPG covering every second.

• Timeline is months, not weeks. Plan for 3 to 6 months from first contact to live on a major platform, sometimes longer.

• Owning vs licensing reach: your own branded apps are reach you control; platform carriage is reach you rent. Smart operators do both.

What does it mean to get a FAST channel "carried"?

Carriage means a FAST platform agrees to list your channel in its lineup, place it in the program guide, and stream it to that platform's audience. You keep ownership of the channel and the content. The platform provides the audience, the storefront placement, and usually a chunk of the ad sales.

A FAST channel is a free, ad-supported linear stream: it plays on a schedule, 24/7, like a traditional TV network, with no subscription. Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV (owned by Paramount), and The Roku Channel are three of the largest FAST aggregators. Getting "carried" on one of them means your channel appears alongside hundreds of others in their guide, reachable by tens of millions of TV households.

The catch: these platforms curate. Pluto TV works with more than 170 content partners and licenses its lineup directly. According to Nielsen's Gracenote data, the global FAST channel count grew nearly 14% in 2025 to roughly 1,850 active channels. More channels chasing finite guide slots means the bar to get carried keeps rising. A clean, well-programmed, rights-cleared channel with a defined audience is what gets a yes.

How does the FAST channel rev-share deal work?

The standard FAST carriage deal is revenue share: the platform sells advertising against your channel and splits the proceeds with you. There is no public rate card. Splits are negotiated per deal and depend on your content's value, whether you or the platform controls ad sales, and your negotiating position.

Two ad-sales structures are common:

• Platform-sold inventory: the platform's ad team sells all the ad slots and pays you a share of the revenue. Simplest for you, less control, and the platform takes the larger cut.

• Split inventory: you keep a portion of the ad breaks to sell yourself (direct or programmatic) and the platform sells the rest. More upside if you have a real ad operation, more work.

Whatever the structure, your channel has to carry the right ad signaling for it to work. That means SCTE-35 markers in the stream at every ad break so the platform's server-side ad insertion (SSAI) knows exactly where to drop a commercial. No SCTE-35, no clean monetization, no deal.

Two industry realities worth knowing before you model revenue. Per Streaming Media Connect 2025 reporting, many FAST channels see ad fill rates of only 20 to 40 percent, well below the 75 to 85 percent that strong operations hit, and standard FAST CPMs commonly sit in the $10 to $12 range. Your share of a partially filled, mid-CPM channel can be modest early on. We do not publish our customers' consumer-level ad numbers, so treat those figures as third-party industry benchmarks, not a Revidd promise. For how the economics actually compound, see our breakdown of how FAST channels make money.

The split-inventory model only pays off if your platform supports the full ad stack. On Revidd that means SCTE-35 markers, server-side ad insertion (SSAI), VAST/VMAP tags, and an Ad Filler Playlist that plays branded content during any break the platform does not fill, so a 30 percent fill rate never shows the viewer a black screen. B4Media UK runs worldwide sports this way, around 2,500 live streaming hours a month with DAI, PPV, and sponsorships layered on the same feed.

What do you need before a platform will carry you?

Before any FAST platform takes you seriously, you need three things in place: cleared rights for every minute you air, a broadcast-grade 24/7 feed, and a machine-readable EPG. Miss any one and the conversation stops. These are non-negotiable, not nice-to-haves.

1. Fully cleared rights. Every second on a 24/7 channel must be content you have the legal right to stream ad-supported on a third-party platform. Music, archival footage, and licensed titles all need the right window. Platforms will ask. "We think it's fine" is not an answer that survives their legal review.

2. A broadcast-grade feed. You must deliver a continuous HLS stream with adaptive bitrate profiles, frame-accurate scheduling, and SCTE-35 ad markers. It cannot drop. If your playout fails for ten minutes, the platform sees dead air and your channel gets flagged. This is why a real playout system with failover matters. Revidd builds the channel in its Program Manager, a drag-and-drop hourly scheduler that maps media clips, playlists, and live streams onto a timeline with Channel Time, UTC, and browser time shown side by side so a 2am ET program does not accidentally air at 2am IST. A Rescue Playlist auto-plays if scheduled content fails, which is exactly the failover a platform's onboarding QA tests for before it approves your slot.

3. A machine-readable EPG. Platforms ingest your schedule as data, usually XMLTV, and most expect 7 to 14 days of forward guide. Per OTT industry guidance on EPG setup, Pluto and Samsung typically want 14 days and Roku and LG accept 7. Every second of the broadcast day must map to a program entry, with branded filler covering any gaps.

If you are still deciding whether to run a channel at all, start with what a FAST channel is and how it works before you invest in distribution.

Carriage prerequisites at a glance

Building toward carriage? Revidd gives broadcasters a broadcast-grade playout engine with SCTE-35, EPG, and Rescue Playlist failover out of the box, so when a platform asks for your feed you can deliver it the same week. Book a Revidd demo and we will walk through your specific channel.

How do you actually pitch Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, and Roku?

You reach each platform's content partnerships or business-development team directly and pitch your channel as a programming proposition. There is no public submission portal for any of the three. Distribution happens through relationships, an outreach email or a warm introduction, followed by a pitch, evaluation, and negotiation.

What the partnerships team wants to see:

• A clear channel concept with a defined audience. "General entertainment" loses. "24/7 classic Tamil cinema" or "regional high-school football" wins, because curated lineups reward channels that own a niche.

• Proof you can run a real channel: a working feed, a programmed schedule, and rights documentation ready to share.

• Audience or library scale that makes you worth a slot. A deep library you fully control is a strong position.

Many operators reach platforms through an aggregator or distribution partner who already has relationships across Samsung, Pluto, Roku, LG, Vizio, and others. That can shorten the path, in exchange for taking a cut. Going direct keeps more economics but takes longer to build trust. Either way, the channel has to be technically ready before the first call, because the first thing they will ask for is your feed and your EPG.

If you have not built the channel yet, our guide on how to launch a FAST channel covers the production and playout steps that come before distribution.

How the three platforms compare for carriage

All three want the same technical fundamentals: a clean 24/7 feed, SCTE-35, and an EPG. They differ in reach, ownership, and how they curate. Here is the practical comparison.

For a deeper side-by-side on audience, monetization, and fit by content type, see our full comparison of Samsung TV Plus vs Pluto TV vs Roku. The short version: do not pick one. Channels typically pursue carriage on several platforms in parallel because each reaches a different slice of the TV audience.

What is the realistic timeline to get carried?

Plan for 3 to 6 months from first contact to live on a major FAST platform, and sometimes longer for the largest ones. Carriage involves a pitch, an evaluation, a contract negotiation, legal and rights review, technical onboarding of your feed and EPG, and QA before launch. Each stage takes weeks.

A realistic sequence:

1. Weeks 0 to 2: build and prove your channel, a stable 24/7 feed, programmed schedule, EPG, rights documentation.

2. Weeks 2 to 8: outreach and pitching. Expect silence, follow-ups, and rejections. Pitch multiple platforms at once.

3. Months 2 to 4: negotiation and contracting once a platform is interested. Rev share, ad-sales structure, term, and exclusivity get settled here.

4. Months 4 to 6: technical onboarding and QA. The platform ingests your feed and EPG, tests SCTE-35 and failover, and schedules launch.

The part you control completely is readiness. The reason FAST channel distribution stalls is usually a feed that is not broadcast-grade or rights that are not clean, not the platform being slow. Getting the feed right before you pitch is the single biggest lever on timeline. On Revidd, broadcasters can stand up a broadcast-grade playout channel with SCTE-35, EPG, and Rescue Playlist failover in days, so the technical side is ready when the business side moves.

Owning vs licensing reach: should you even chase carriage?

You should do both. Platform carriage is reach you rent: large audiences you do not own, on someone else's terms, with the platform taking a share. Your own branded apps are reach you own: a direct relationship with viewers across Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, mobile, and web, with full control of data and monetization.

The strongest broadcasters run a single channel two ways. The same playout feed powers their owned-and-operated apps and gets licensed out to Samsung TV Plus, Pluto, and Roku for incremental reach. One programming effort, two distribution surfaces. Networks such as TrueVi run multi-channel FAST ecosystems this way on Revidd, and Niche Network TV powers more than 200 active linear and re-stream channels on the same stack. Across all customers, the Revidd platform reaches more than 38 million viewers and 5.2 million monthly active audience across 15 countries from one integration that covers 50+ device endpoints, with branded apps delivered in as little as one to two weeks before each platform's own app-store review.

Owned apps are also your insurance. Carriage deals end, rev shares change, and platforms re-curate. If the audience you built lives only inside someone else's app, you do not own it. Build the owned channel first, then license the feed out for reach you cannot get on your own.

Conclusion: treat FAST channel distribution as a deal, then nail the feed

FAST channel distribution onto Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel comes down to two jobs done well: win the carriage deal, and deliver a feed clean enough to keep it. The deal is relationship work, pitching the right partnerships team with a defined channel and cleared rights. The feed is engineering work, a broadcast-grade 24/7 HLS stream with SCTE-35, a 7-to-14-day EPG, and failover that keeps the slot alive.

Most broadcasters can do the first part with patience. The second part is where a platform like Revidd removes the in-house engineering burden. If you have a library and want to be carriage-ready in weeks instead of quarters, book a Revidd demo and we will set up a broadcast-grade FAST channel built to pass platform onboarding, then help you point it at both your own apps and the major aggregators.

FAQ

Can I just upload my FAST channel to Pluto TV or Roku myself?
No. Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel do not offer self-serve channel upload. You have to pitch each platform's content partnerships team and sign a carriage and revenue-share agreement. Carriage is granted through a deal, not an upload.

How much does it cost to get carried on a FAST platform?
There is usually no listing fee. The platform takes a share of ad revenue instead. Rev-share splits are negotiated per deal and not published. Your real cost is building and running a broadcast-grade 24/7 channel that meets their technical and rights requirements.

Do I need SCTE-35 to get a FAST channel carried?
Yes, in practice. SCTE-35 markers tell the platform's server-side ad insertion exactly where each ad break is. Without them the platform cannot cleanly monetize your channel, which is the basis of the rev-share deal. A platform-ready feed includes SCTE-35 markers and a machine-readable EPG.

How long does it take to get a FAST channel on Samsung, Pluto, or Roku?
Plan for 3 to 6 months from first contact to launch, sometimes longer. The time goes into pitching, contract negotiation, rights and legal review, and technical onboarding of your feed and EPG. Having a stable, broadcast-grade feed ready before you pitch is the biggest factor you control.

Should I run my own branded app or just get carried on FAST platforms?
Both. Carriage gives you large rented reach on platforms you do not control. Your own apps give you a direct, owned audience across every major device with full control of data and monetization. The same playout feed can power both, so most serious broadcasters do both.

Can one feed be distributed to multiple FAST platforms at once?
Yes. A single broadcast-grade playout channel can be licensed to Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and others in parallel, and also power your own branded apps. One programming effort, multiple distribution surfaces, which is the most efficient way to maximize reach.