New Free Service Offers Tons Of Stand-Up Comedy

The Stand Up Channel has been brought to fruition by the minds behind Comedy Dynamics, which serves as the world’s largest independent stand-up distributor. The channel will feature a variety of new original stand-up specials from comedy up-and-comers as well as legends of the stage, with Amazon originals already ported onto the service for your consumption.

Per Deadline, the service already contains full-length stand-up comedy specials from the likes of Jeff Dunham, Larry the Cable Guy, Whitney Cummings, Eddie Griffin, Tiffany Haddish, Tom Segura, and Silicon Valley‘s Jimmy O. Yang, among others.

The Stand Up Channel is the latest in a line of free ad-supported streaming television outlets, or FAST channels, as they’ve come to be known. Other examples of successful FAST channels include Tubi, Pluto TV, and Crackle, each of which successfully bring in millions of viewing hours each year.

The FAST sector has been rapidly growing in recent years, as audiences around the globe have become inundated with subscription-based television and film models, leaving them more open to the concept of free programming with intermittent advertisements.

Like other FAST channels available to stream through Amazon, The Stand Up Channel can be found on Prime Video, as well as the official Freevee app and on Fire TV home screens. With any luck, the service will be a major outlet for budding stage acts, particularly those looking to break into the industry from TikTok fame, as traditional outlets like Netflix and HBO have become increasingly difficult barriers for new talent in recent years.

Likewise, consumers have begun to shy away from the traditional streaming model as the major services have each been hiking prices substantially in recent years, as part of a desperate bid to make the business model more profitable.

While the creation of The Stand Up Channel is the latest move from Comedy Dynamics, it’s far from the distributor’s first step in securing new original content. CEO Brian Volk-Weiss previously worked alongside the likes of Kevin Hart, Zac Efron, and numerous other stars to develop comedy material for a myriad of other streamers.

These projects include the NAACP Image Award-nominated Kevin Hart’s Guide To Black History, Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us, and Disney+’s Behind The Attraction.

Hopefully The Stand Up Channel will see fast growth on Freevee, since the market for comedy fans is extremely wide. Volk-Weiss has specifically mentioned an interest in cornering the market on all forms of the comedy niche, from blue collar, to roasts, to musical specials such as Bo Burnham’s Inside.

For now, there’s no way of knowing how the service will perform, though the immediate release strategy seems quite promising.

Source: Deadline