FAST viewing grew 55% as metadata problems weighed on revenue

Global FAST viewing hours increased 55% year over year in Amagi’s June 2026 “Airtime Report,” with Latin America posting the strongest regional growth and metadata problems emerging as a growing operational and revenue concern.

The findings were based on approximately 6,500 FAST channel deliveries distributed through Amagi Thunderstorm, the company’s server-side ad insertion platform. The analysis covered April 1 through June 15, 2026, compared with the same period in 2025.

The U.S. and Canada remained the largest monetization market, accounting for 54% of global viewing hours and 74% of global ad impressions.

Latin America recorded the fastest regional growth. Viewing hours increased 190% and ad impressions rose 124%, a change Amagi attributed in part to the addition of high-viewership channels and expansion of the channel portfolio measured by the report.

Entertainment remained the largest genre, generating 41% of classified viewing hours and 40% of ad impressions. News accounted for 27% of viewing hours and 33% of ad impressions.

Kids programming was the fastest-growing genre, with viewing hours up 191% and ad impressions increasing 118% year over year.

The report also examined metadata challenges through a survey of 28 senior media practitioners representing content owners, channel operators, broadcasters, streaming platforms, advertising teams and technology vendors.

Eighty-six percent of respondents said reformatting metadata for different platform requirements was their largest operational burden. The same percentage said poor metadata was reducing ad revenue, weakening content discovery or causing platforms to deprioritize their programming.

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Seventy-one percent said metadata supplied by content owners was incomplete and that the problem was worsening. Missing information included genres, ratings, imagery and episode data.

Fifty-seven percent said artificial intelligence could already generate synopses, tags and genres reliably enough to require only spot checks by human reviewers. Sixty-eight percent expected AI to handle most metadata generation with minimal human oversight within three years.

Another 68% expected major streaming platforms, rather than content owners, to establish metadata standards during that period.

Among planned investments during the next 12 months, 32% of respondents identified improved AI tools as a priority. Twenty-five percent cited the development of in-house metadata capabilities.

Gavin Bridge, chief analyst at FASTMaster, contributed analysis on the operational effects of fragmented metadata requirements and the growing role of AI-based content discovery.

“The metadata that wins is the kind that can be consumed by agents — human and AI. Bad metadata won’t just look wrong in a grid; it’ll be invisible to the systems doing the recommending,” Bridge said.

“FAST has earned its place at the centre of the modern media stack. What this report makes clear is that the next competitive edge isn’t reach; it’s operational precision,” said Srinivasan KA, Amagi co-founder and president of global business.

“Metadata is where discovery, ad revenue, and audience intelligence converge, and the industry is only beginning to close the gap between what it knows and what it acts on,” he said.

The report was the 17th edition of Amagi’s quarterly FAST analysis. The company said its channel data was not a universal measure of the FAST market and that the survey findings were directional rather than statistically representative of the wider industry.