The FAST Boom Is Creating a New Kind of Streaming Software Buyer

Fox's $22 billion agreement to acquire Roku highlights a surge in demand for streaming software from first-time free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) operators, as US viewers streamed 1.8 billion hours of FAST content in August 2025, up 43% year-over-year from 1.3 billion hours in August 2024, according to Comscore. This new buyer category requires full-stack solutions, with server-side ad insertion (SSAI) as the key differentiator, favoring vendors like Amagi that built platforms around monetization from the start.

The FAST Boom Is Creating a New Kind of Streaming Software Buyer When media giant Fox agreed to acquire streaming platform Roku for $22 billion https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cql1yew3vezo , many focused on connected TV distribution and advertising https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts/Agentic-AI-and-CTV-Advertising-175272.aspx reach. But the move also points to a trend streaming software vendors should be watching--how free ad-supported streaming television FAST https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=175399 now drives a large share of demand for the software delivering and monetizing video. US viewers streamed 1.8 billion hours of FAST content in August 2025 alone, up 43% year on year, from 1.3 billion hours in August 2024,according to Comscore https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2025/2025-State-of-Streaming . This is creating a new category of buyer with very specific technology requirements. Demand is now emerging around the infrastructure required to support that growth--and the vendors best placed to capture it are those who built for this buyer profile before the rest of the market caught up. A different kind of buyer The growth of FAST channels https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Columns/Future-in-Focus/What-the-Growth-of-FAST-Really-Tells-Us-About-Viewers-157082.aspx is bringing all sorts of new organizations into the streaming software market, attracting buyers that previously had little or no streaming infrastructure and are launching channels for the first time. The streaming software market is broadly split between horizontal platforms covering the full value chain, and a saturated ecosystem of specialized ‘best-of-breed’ point solutions dominating specific layers. For an established broadcaster, navigating that landscape is manageable. A first-time FAST operator faces added complexity on an already significant technical undertaking. These buyers need the full stack: encoding and transcoding to prepare content, a content management system CMS to organize programming, CDN infrastructure for delivery, server-side ad insertion to monetize, and applications for viewers across devices. For an established broadcaster moving from linear to streaming, much of this capability will already exist. For a sports rights holder, regional media company, or content owner launching a FAST channel from scratch, it certainly does not. As one director of digital media product development at a major broadcaster put it: "It's a massive engineering project. Once you've done it, you want to not do it again for a long time." First-time buyers will understand the content opportunity, but not necessarily the technical lift needed to deliver and monetise such a channel at scale. That gap gives providers a valuable opportunity to streamline the process, and in doing so, expand the addressable market. Why ad insertion is the key differentiator Of all the capabilities a viable FAST channel requires, server-side ad insertion SSAI https://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts/How-does-SGAI-differ-from-SSAI-and-CSAI-for-live-streaming-monetisation-169969.aspx is the most commercially important and the most technically challenging. SSAI requires content, advertising systems and playback experiences to work in harmony without disrupting the viewer. In live streaming environments this gets even more complex, particularly when dealing with requirements like digital rights management DRM . This creates an advantage for vendors that built their platforms around streaming monetization rather than adding advertising capabilities later. FAST-focused providers like Amagi, for example, have been positioned strongly because they designed their technology around channel creation, distribution and monetization workflows. As operators scale beyond single channels, automation is a practical necessity. Automating metadata management, scheduling assistance and ad-break detection can substantially reduce the manual effort required to operate multiple channels, especially for smaller operators with limited headcount. Not all AI capabilities carry the same weight here. Infrastructure AI - embedded into encoding, routing and delivery pipelines - builds defensible switching costs and requires proprietary data accumulated over years of deployments to replicate. Functional AI - metadata tagging, scheduling automation, ad-break detection - is increasingly commoditized via third-party APIs. This means defensibility depends on how tightly those capabilities are integrated into the workflow, rather than the capabilities themselves. The importance of architecture Large broadcasters with significant engineering resources can manage complex technology environments and integrate multiple systems. New FAST operators need a simpler approach. For Tier 2 broadcasters and first-time channel operators, cost predictability is the dominant purchase driver. Lean editorial teams typically have neither the capacity nor the appetite for heavy custom API development. Once a channel is live, the operational challenge becomes day-to-day coordination across content management, distribution, advertising and analytics. Fragmented systems make that harder, and the overhead of managing multiple disconnected platforms compounds quickly as channel volumes grow. As AI is added across streaming workflows, platform coherence matters more. Automation only works reliably when data flows cleanly between systems. Vendors that cannot provide that undermine their own AI roadmap. FAST buyers evaluating vendors need to hear whether the platform can support these capabilities in practice without adding unhelpful complexity. What FAST means for streaming software vendors Dedale Intelligence https://www.dedale.com/ points to a substantial addressable market for Tier 2 next-generation VOD broadcasters the segment most closely aligned with first-time FAST operators , though the more telling signal is qualitative. The Fox and Roku deal is the clearest indication yet that ad-supported streaming has moved from secondary revenue line to strategic priority. How well streaming software vendors are positioned to serve the operators that follow will depend on decisions about platform architecture that most of them made years ago. Vendors that didn’t build for this profile early can still compete: through acquisitions, white-label partnerships, or modular integrations with FAST specialists. But these additions need to be delivered to operators as a coherent experience, or vendors risk worsening the problem by adding to the complexity new buyers are trying to avoid. Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Dedale Intelligence http://dedale.com . Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers. Related Articles The flexibility of FAST channels has led to the emergence of FAST channel pop-ups, which can be created to cover niche content, test formats, and even react to specific events, such as an iconic celebrity's passing, to showcase their work. This vitality has generated a growing demand for pop-up FAST channels, and while the technology to launch them continues to improve, there are still technical, marketing, discoverability, and other logistical issues to overcome. In this article, several industry experts weigh in on both the various benefits and challenges of FAST channel pop-ups and what their continued development means for the industry. 23 Jun 2026 How will the advent of agentic AI impact CTV advertising and streaming adtech in ways that previously predominant AI technologies AI/ML, generative AI haven't left their mark on OTT monetization technologies, workflows, management, and strategy? IAB Tech Lab's Shailley Singh offers a concise explanation of the current state of play, and what IAB Tech Lab is developing with its agent-to-agent communication framework, while FreeWheel's Jeff Ellin offers a candid take on where buyers, sellers, and publishers are with agentic and LLM implementation today in this discussion with Streaming Media's Nadine Krefetz at Streaming Media Connect 2026. 16 Jun 2026 The popularity and growth of FAST show us that viewing behavior, despite the rise of streaming, hasn't really changed much at all. People want choice, but they want it in a way that meets their needs. FAST doesn't scrap the broadcast experience with which so many are familiar; it is evolving it in a way that broadcast could never do to improve upon the viewer experience. 09 Feb 2023