FAST viewing surges 43% to 1.8 billion hours as platforms withhold audience data

September 12, 2026 · AdExchanger

At a recent industry event, an executive described a meeting with a major distribution platform that had agreed to share audience data: when the meeting happened, the platform arrived with a printout it wouldn't let anyone keep, AdExchanger's On TV & Video column recounts. The anecdote sits alongside numbers that show a category growing fast: Comscore counted 1.8 billion hours of US FAST viewing through August 2025, up 43% year over year; Amagi puts global FAST viewing growth at 55% year over year through mid-2026; and eMarketer expects 131 million US FAST users in 2026, or 54% of all CTV users. Wurl reports session duration up 25% year over year, sports programming on FAST grew 30% in the first quarter of 2026, and local news viewing in OTT is up 69% year over year.

Unverified FAST inventory gets priced down: revenue per viewing hour at some operators has dropped from 18 cents to eight cents in a few years, and CPMs that were once $30 are approaching single digits, according to the column. The Nielsen Gauge only captures Tubi, Pluto TV and The Roku Channel at the scale needed to register, leaving hundreds of other channels reporting viewing hours nobody outside the operator can confirm. The column's proposed fix is baseline device-level delivery verification of content and ads, and it draws a direct line to cable's earlier transparency fight: platforms that resisted independent ratings eventually lost the market, while those that embraced verification built the trust that sustained cable's upfront dominance for two decades. Tastemade's Evan Bregman captured the stakes at StreamTV: "The industry is leaving money on the table collectively."