Paramount is the biggest name in FAST (in terms of channel volume), and it controls 9.8% of it. That is the whole story in a single number. The FAST Directory's footprint chart looks, at a glance, like the studio carve-up everyone expects — Paramount, A+E, Warner Bros. Discovery stacked across the top like a cable bundle reborn. Then you read the actual share, and the oligopoly evaporates. The biggest gatekeeper on the dial can't muster a tenth of it.

Here's how to read the boxes. Each channel is weighted by its advertiser-attractiveness score (1–10) multiplied by how many of the eight tracked services carry it — an audience-weighted footprint, the FAST equivalent of market cap. An owner's box is its footprint divided by the whole market. Sum it all up and you get a concentration index — the HHI antitrust desks use — that sits at 281 in June, up a barely-perceptible +12 from March's 269. Context is everything here: regulators don't even raise an eyebrow below 1,500, and reserve "highly concentrated" for 2,500-plus. At 281, FAST isn't in the same postal code as concentrated. It's a market holding roughly steady at diffuse.

The names up top are real, to be fair. Paramount leads on 9.8% across 180 channels, and it's still building — +49 footprint since March. A+E Networks is the quiet mover, posting the biggest gain in the top ten at +66 to claim 6.3% on just 61 channels — proof that footprint rewards quality and carriage, not channel-count for its own sake. Then the gaps start showing. Warner Bros. Discovery holds 5.9% but is shedding (-20). Radial Entertainment runs more channels than A+E — 77 of them — for a smaller 5.3% slice, and it's slipping too (-24). NBCUniversal sits at 4.7%. After that the slices thin to a rounding error: Stingray at 2.4%, BBC Studios at 2.2% and climbing (+26), Lionsgate at 2.1% but bleeding the worst in the group (-30), AMC at 2.0% (-18), Fremantle level with it at 2.0% but rising (+24).

Add the recognizable logos together and you get a number that flatters them less than the chart does: the top five own 32%, the top ten 43%. Which means the majority of the dial — 57% of all footprint — belongs to nobody you've put on a slide. It's split across the back half of 348 distinct owners, a long tail of small operators that collectively dwarfs any single major. The studios didn't consolidate FAST. They moved into a neighborhood that was already full.

This is the inversion worth sitting with. Linear television trained an entire industry to assume that the firms with the famous names hold the leverage, because in cable they did — carriage was scarce and a handful of conglomerates controlled the pipe. FAST inverts the physics. Carriage is cheap, slots are effectively unlimited, and a 1–10 attractiveness score does more for your footprint than a marquee name does. The result is a medium where the loudest brands are also, mathematically, the least dominant they've ever been. Paramount's 9.8% isn't a throne. It's a reminder that there isn't one.

For ad buyers, that's not chaos — it's optionality: no single owner can hold your spend hostage. For operators, it's an open door that hasn't closed. The threshold for "concentrated" sits at 1,500. The dial sits at 281, and it has barely moved in a quarter.

Don't take the treemap's word for it. Read the whole dial — every owner, every slice — at https://fastdirectory.fastmaster-intelligence.com.