At a recent industry event, an executive described a meeting with a major distribution platform. The platform had agreed to share audience data. When the meeting finally happened, they arrived with a printout. They wouldn’t let anyone keep it.
That anecdote captures something important about the current moment in free ad-supported TV (FAST): the gap between what the category is delivering and what the market is able to confirm.
Consider these numbers: ComScore reported a 43% year-over-year increase in US FAST viewing hours through August 2025, reaching 1.8 billion hours. Amagi puts global FAST viewing growth at 55% year-over-year through mid-2026. EMarketer estimates FAST users in the US will reach 131 million in 2026, representing 54% of all CTV users.
These are not the metrics of a struggling medium. They are the metrics of a mainstream one. The problem is not FAST’s audience. The problem is the industry’s ability to prove it.
What’s actually working
Viewer engagement on FAST is deepening, not just broadening. According to Wurl, session duration is up 25% year over year. Viewers are building habits.
Reality, drama and documentary dominate consumption. Sports programming on FAST grew 30% in the first quarter of 2026 alone. News commands a consistent share, spiking sharply during major events. Local news is up 69% year over year in OTT viewing. FAST is increasingly where people go for the kind of lean-back, appointment-adjacent viewing that cable once owned.
The content argument deserves particular attention, because the “dumping ground for back catalogues nobody wants to watch” critique has become a reflex in the industry.
But it’s not a complete picture.
Legacy titles like “Forensic Files,” “Unsolved Mysteries” or “Untold Stories of the E.R.” have documented viewership histories with decades of audience data behind them. A series that ran for 15 seasons on a major cable network doesn’t lose its audience because it moves to a FAST channel. The audience follows the content. What changes is whether the infrastructure around that content can surface and validate the viewing that is taking place. That’s a measurement gap.
Yes, there is content on FAST that isn’t finding audiences. The existence of poorly performing inventory does not indict the category, and it shouldn’t obscure the genuine demand that exists for well-curated FAST channels built around content people want to watch.
Where the real problem lives
The credibility gap that does exist in FAST is structural, and it has a specific cause: Platforms are sitting on audience data that would validate the inventory they’re selling, and they are choosing not to share it.
Data is power. CTV platforms that hoard viewership and audience composition data hold a structural advantage over individual FAST channel operators in content renewal negotiations. Showing a channel operator only what they need to see, and never letting them keep it, is a negotiating tactic. It is also strangling the category’s advertising economics.
Revenue per viewing hour at some operators has dropped from 18 to eight cents in just a few years. CPMs that were once $30 are approaching single digits. The instinct is to blame oversupply, since there are hundreds of channels per platform. But the deeper driver of compression is that the buy side has retreated from a category it cannot independently verify. That is a transparency failure.
The Nielsen Gauge captures Tubi, Pluto TV and The Roku Channel because they are large enough aggregated services to register at scale. Other FAST channels do not appear. Nielsen and others have said publicly they can measure these channels. They are not being allowed to. The result is a market where operators report viewing hours that the buy side cannot confirm, and the rational response from agencies has been to discount the inventory accordingly.
Confusing opacity with fraud
But “unverified” doesn’t mean “fake.”
Unverified means the infrastructure to confirm it hasn’t been built.
FAST has an industrywide verification problem, and the call for baseline device-level confirmation is the right starting point: on-the-glass delivery verification of content and ads, without person-level measurement. It would confirm that the inventory being sold is the inventory being delivered. It is the minimum standard the buy side should expect, and it’s achievable without requiring the full measurement infrastructure that the broader conversation is waiting on.
The case for optimism
Cable had this debate. The platforms that resisted third-party ratings transparency eventually lost the market. The ones that embraced independent verification built the advertiser trust that sustained two decades of cable’s dominance in the upfront. FAST is at that same inflection point.
Evan Bregman of Tastemade put it plainly at StreamTV: The industry is leaving money on the table collectively. A senior content executive saying this publicly is a signal that the conversation is moving in the right direction.
FAST’s resolution could come faster than cable’s did. The measurement technology exists. The third-party infrastructure is ready. What’s missing is access to the data.
What the industry needs is independent measurement. Markets correct when they have accurate signals. That is a solvable problem, and solving it is what the next chapter of FAST looks like.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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