Who Is FAST For? [A Luminate Intelligence Special Report Preview]

FAST sits at a pivotal moment. The early promise of the format—where low operating costs meant niche content could finally find a dedicated audience—has faded under the weight of its own excess.

Having spent time both analyzing FAST from the outside and running it from the inside as Head of FAST for Amazon MGM Studios, I have watched this market develop, mature, and begin to strain. The industry knows what the problems are: too many channels, too little demographic ambition, and a years-long obsession with total viewing hours that has consistently crowded out the harder question of who is actually watching.

There are bright spots. Samsung TV Plus first leaned into attracting Millennials with the exclusive Conan and Letterman channels and is now doing the same with Gen Z through partnerships with creators like Dhar Mann and Mark Rober. Major media companies have continued to embrace the format — Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and A+E Networks have all built substantial channel footprints, recognizing that free streaming is too large an audience to ignore. And platforms like Peacock and Paramount+ have made a deliberate strategic commitment to premium linear, building coherent channel libraries behind their subscription walls — a model that solves the infinite inventory problem by design, commanding the CPMs that the free tier increasingly struggles to sustain.

But bright spots are not a strategy. The existential challenge facing FAST is generational. The format was built for, and has been captured by, an older demographic with the behavioral habit for passive linear viewing. Gen Z and younger Millennials are not going to navigate an 600-channel EPG. They already have their answer — it's a swipeable feed, algorithmically curated, capped at a fraction of what legacy platforms currently carry. FAST either meets them there or cedes that audience permanently to TikTok and Twitch.

This requires a radical rethink: not incremental pruning, but a fundamental reinvention of how channels are programmed, how grids are presented, and what FAST is actually for. The platforms that survive the next five years will be those that treat curation as a competitive advantage rather than an operational afterthought.

FAST is a multibillion-dollar industry with a passionate and loyal audience. That audience deserves better than a dumping ground for decades-old cable libraries. "There's gold in old" — but that gold belongs in diginets, where its audience already lives. FAST itself needs careful, deliberate cultivation: fewer channels, sharper demographics, and a genuine commitment to the advertisers it is asking to fund it. The promise of the format is still there. It just needs someone to take it seriously.