Amagi’s Dan Marshall on where FAST goes next and why live programming is the answer

The free ad-supported streaming television market is not collapsing, but it is running out of runway for the growth model that carried it through its first decade. At the 2026 NAB Show, Dan Marshall, executive vice president of global SaaS sales at Amagi, offered a candid assessment of where FAST stands – and what the platforms and content owners using it need to do differently.

“There’s still money in FAST,” Marshall said. “But I think the days of FAST growing at 25, 50, 30% — those days are starting to limit out.”

The underlying dynamics are shifting in several directions at once.

Tier one content is flooding the major FAST platforms, such as Tubi and Pluto TV, putting pressure on smaller and mid-tier content owners whose channels once benefited from relative scarcity. Some of those owners are moving content to YouTube entirely, where ad fill rates and discovery are increasingly competitive. Platform consolidation is concentrating distribution leverage at the top. And the audience for free ad-supported content is not going away, but its attention is increasingly difficult to capture and hold.

Live is the variable that changes the math

The clearest signal Marshall pointed to at the show was the correlation between live programming and revenue performance on FAST.

Content that airs live generates higher CPMs and better engagement than archive programming, and the platforms that have begun integrating live streams are seeing it in the numbers.

“The more live programming that you can integrate into your FAST, the more money you’re going to make,” he said. “You have to have content that lends itself to live — whether it’s news, entertainment or sports.”

Amagi has been building out that capability with customers directly.

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The company ran the live distribution infrastructure for CNN’s FAST channel launch and is handling live delivery for the NBA’s G League and WNBA, both of which face fewer rights restrictions than the league’s primary broadcast properties. It has also worked with music platforms, experimenting with live artist events as FAST programming.

Marshall noted that rights constraints remain a real barrier for established broadcasters considering live on FAST.

A tier one cable network cannot easily strip its archive of the clearances required for digital distribution, let alone put live feeds onto free platforms. Newer or niche content owners, and sports properties with more flexible rights structures, have more room to move.

Front porching and the MVPD opportunity

One of the shifts Marshall described is what he called front porching – the practice of cable operators, satellite providers and telcos embedding FAST channels directly into their electronic program guides.

To the subscriber, new channels simply appear in the lineup without any additional cost or action required. To the content owner, it opens distribution to cable audiences who may never have interacted with a standalone streaming app.

“You have these MVPDs, whether it’s cable operators, satellite telcos, figuring out how they bring FAST to front porch their EPG,” Marshall said. “To the user, they don’t care. All they’re seeing is 20, 30, 40 new channels coming that they didn’t have before. It doesn’t cost them any more money.”

He cited DirecTV, TiVo, Virgin Media and Vodafone among operators pursuing this approach, and described it as one of the more durable distribution opportunities in the current environment, particularly because it reaches audiences who are not actively seeking out FAST apps but will engage with content once it is placed in front of them.

Monetization beyond the 30-second spot

Marshall said a significant part of Amagi’s work with customers now involves rethinking how ad inventory is packaged and sold on FAST, not just how content is distributed. The traditional model, filling 30-second ad pods and hoping for reasonable fill rates, is increasingly insufficient for channels trying to generate meaningful revenue.

The company’s zero-slate product, which automatically advances programming when a time slot is not filled rather than displaying dead air or slate, is one example of an operational fix with measurable revenue impact. Marshall said viewers churn out when they see slate and that eliminating it, even at the tail end of a program that runs short, translates directly into retained impressions.

“We know they churn out when they see slate,” he said. “So if that ad is not filled, it advances program.”

Beyond that, Amagi is working with customers on in-content advertising formats, including squeeze backs, picture-in-picture, and L-bands, pod splitting and ad tiering strategies. The pitch to advertisers that FAST inventory should be considered seriously, not just as a remnant buy, requires both the technical capability to execute non-standard formats and the audience data to back up the value proposition.

“On the other side, you have to get the advertisers to realize that advertising opportunities don’t just come in 30-second ad spots,” Marshall said. “It’s going to require some library of alternatives.”

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Amagi’s broader product push at NAB Show reflects that direction.

The company announced agentic AI capabilities across its Amagi NOW platform, integrating automated agents for metadata enrichment, artwork generation, ad-break identification and localization across more than 25 languages. It also launched Newspulse, an agentic AI tool designed for newsrooms that monitors live broadcasts and VOD libraries, packages individual stories as social-ready clips and publishes them across digital channels, all within defined editorial guardrails.

Marshall positioned both as practical tools for customers dealing with the cost pressures and content volume demands of operating at FAST scale, rather than as conceptual demonstrations.

“We actually have products and services based on agentic AI that customers are buying today, paying good money for, and they’re doing what they’re supposed to,” he said. “That’s key.”

The content migration question

A pattern Marshall acknowledged, and said the jury is still out on, is the movement of content from FAST channels to YouTube.

FilmRise and others have begun pulling content from FAST platforms and making full episode libraries available directly on YouTube, where they can capture ad revenue without platform intermediaries.

He said the shift reflects the pressure smaller content owners face as tier one content competes for the same eyeballs. When a FAST channel stops generating the revenue it once did, the economics of moving to YouTube can start to look attractive.

“That’s what happens as more and more tier one content comes to the big platforms and dilutes the niche model,” Marshall said. “It’s just forcing some of these channels to find other means of finding revenue.”

What he does not see changing is the fundamental value of the FAST model for content owners with libraries to monetize, live rights to exploit or audiences to build. The consolidation and the content migration are a shakeout, not an ending.

“There’s still growth,” he said. “Our business still sees growth.”

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