The FAST Dial Didn't Shrink. Amazon Just Stopped Showing You the Local Stations.

The headline number says the US FAST market lost 5.0% of its channels between March and June — 1,526 left standing in June, down from the count a quarter earlier. Read that line and you'd assume the bundle is contracting. It isn't. Strip out one bookkeeping event — Amazon moving its local-station listings behind a per-market gate, so a market that once saw 200-plus now sees about 20, lopping ~218 local listings off the count in a single stroke — and the apples-to-apples figure flips to +2.8%. The dial grew. The shrinkage was a filing change, not a fundamental.

Knowing the difference between those two readings — the mirage and the market — is the entire job of The FAST Directory, a free, fast, channel-level read on all 1,522 unique channels carried across Roku, Prime Video, Samsung TV Plus, Vizio, LG, Pluto, Tubi and Xumo. It doesn't hand you a list and wish you luck. It tells you what the movement means.

A read, not a roster

The Directory runs on six lenses. Market gives you the whole universe at a glance. Service breaks any one platform down by genre, sub-genre and owner, and counts what's exclusive to it — and exclusivity is not rare: 627 channels live on exactly one service, while only 30 are carried on all eight. Owner answers who actually supplies the dial, and the answer has a clear lead: Paramount stocks it with 180 channels. Genre drills to sub-genre. Age Skew ranks every service by the demographic it courts. Vintage sorts single-IP and franchise channels by the decade their source material premiered, and that catalogue peaks hard in the 2010s — 133 channels — which is a polite way of saying FAST is, structurally, a reruns machine.

Each channel also carries an Advertiser-Attractiveness score from 1 to 10 — the who would actually pay to sit next to this read that turns a roster into a media plan. Quarter-over-quarter carriage tracking flags every channel as new, dropped, or gaining and losing platforms, with a March-versus-June map of where each one travelled. There's a creator-led filter (45 channels qualify), an exclusives view, search, and sorts by attractiveness, movers, carriage and demo. And because a channel renamed across quarters would otherwise read as a fake death plus a fake birth, the Directory merges those — so a wardrobe change never gets logged as a funeral.

Three things worth the click

Prime's loss was a gate, not a purge. Prime's listings fell from 855 to 645, a 210-channel drop that accounts for essentially the entire sector's red quarter — and every one of those was a local station moved behind a market gate, not a catalogue cut. Read it as a purge and you'd write Prime's obituary. Read the apples-to-apples line and you'd notice everyone else was building: Samsung added 36 channels (542 to 578), Roku 20 (699 to 719), LG 11, Tubi 7, Xumo 4. The dial grew. One gate just shouted louder than seven open doors.

Pluto is the rerun vault. If the whole sector leans on the 2010s, Pluto leans further back than anyone: 49% of its single-IP and franchise channels premiered before 2000, with a median premiere year of 2000 flat. That isn't an insult — it's a strategy you can now see and price. Pluto sells the familiar, and the Vintage lens lets a buyer find the audience that wants exactly that.

The young dial and the old one are pulling apart. Vizio aims 53% of its channels at the 50-plus viewer, the oldest skew on the board; Samsung aims just 34% there, the youngest. And the quarter moved them further apart: the 65-plus cohort contracted 30.8% while the 18-34 cohort grew 4.8%. In fairness, that 65-plus collapse isn't a verdict on older viewers — it's the dropped local-news listings, which skewed oldest, leaving the building. But the Age Skew lens lets you separate the two stories instead of guessing, and the second story is real: the dial is getting younger where it isn't getting gated.

There's a fourth worth a look. Spanish-language FAST now runs 182 channels and grew 5.8% quarter over quarter, led by TelevisaUnivision — its own expansion story, not a footnote to anyone else's. An EN/ES toggle recomputes the entire Market view, so that growth stops being a rounding error and becomes a segment you can actually plan against.

That's the point of all of it. A channel count tells you what's on. The carriage map, the attractiveness score, the demo leaderboard and the vintage stack tell you what it's worth and which way it's going. One of those is a list. The other is a decision.

The dial didn't shrink this quarter. It got younger, more Spanish, and more honest with anyone willing to read past the headline. Read past it free.

→ fastdirectory.fastmaster-intelligence.com

Fancy some fun? Take down The Multiplier as he tries to launch more FAST channels than the market can take.