The FAST channel boom is roughly five years deep now and the content libraries that fuelled the early growth have been mined out. Every available episode of every recognisable old show has been licensed to one channel or another. The 2026 question for FAST operators isn’t where to find more content — it’s what to actually do with channels when the easy library plays are over.

The experiments running across Pluto TV, Tubi, the Roku Channel, Plex, Amazon Freevee and the various local launches are revealing in what they tell you about where the streaming economy is going next.

The single-show channel

The clearest 2026 trend is the single-show 24/7 channel. Take one beloved property — Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bob Ross, MASH, whatever has the rights cleared — and run it on loop with rotating episode order. The pitch to viewers is comfort viewing without algorithmic surprise. The pitch to advertisers is genre-pure inventory with predictable audience demographics.

The data on these channels is interesting. Watch time per session is high. Viewer return rates are high. Ad completion rates are higher than the FAST channel average because the audience is genuinely there to watch, not channel surfing. The economics work better than most people expected when the format started.

Pluto TV alone is now running over 50 single-show channels. Tubi has fewer but is running them with more aggressive ad loads. The Roku Channel sits in the middle. The trend is clearly viable for properties that have enough episodes and a dedicated enough fanbase to support endless looping.

The bizarre programming experiments

Where it gets interesting is the channels that aren’t single-show but aren’t conventional thematic channels either. There’s a Pluto TV channel running 24/7 fail compilations. There’s a Tubi channel that’s all dashcam footage. There’s a Plex channel running nothing but old infomercials with the original ad breaks intact, which is a kind of TV anthropology that I find oddly compelling.

The economics here are different. The content is dirt cheap to license or sometimes outright public domain. The audience is small but consistent. The advertising fit is harder, which means CPMs are lower, but the content cost is so low that the channels still make sense as inventory generators.

The Hollywood Reporter covered some of these in March 2026 with appropriate skepticism. A few of them won’t last. A few of them will become quiet successes that nobody outside the FAST industry talks about. This is how all new TV formats work.

The AI-generated channel question

This is the part nobody wants to talk about openly but which is happening. There are now several FAST channels in the US and Europe running content that’s either fully AI-generated or substantially AI-modified. Talking head news channels with synthetic anchors. Cooking channels with generated chefs. Travel content that’s a mix of stock footage and AI-generated narration.

The legal and disclosure situation is murky. Most of these channels disclose somewhere in their metadata that the content is AI-generated, but the disclosure is buried. Audience reaction has been mixed. Some viewers haven’t noticed. Others have explicitly avoided channels once they realised. The CPMs on these channels are rumoured to be lower than equivalent live-action channels because some advertisers refuse to run alongside synthetic content, but the production cost is low enough that the math works.

This is going to be one of the big regulatory questions for 2027. Reuters reported in February that the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive is being amended to require clearer disclosure of AI-generated content. The US has nothing equivalent moving and probably won’t.

The local-language opportunity

The other 2026 experiment that’s working is highly localised FAST channels in markets that the major US-based FAST platforms haven’t served well. Australia is a small example of this. There are now several Australian FAST channels running classic Australian TV content (with appropriate rights, mostly), Australian sports highlights packages, and Australian factual content that wouldn’t get any traction on a global FAST platform but works fine for local audiences.

The local channels have lower CPMs in absolute terms but better targeting than the global channels can offer Australian advertisers. Several local agencies are now buying FAST inventory specifically for the Australian-targeting capability that traditional connected TV buying can’t deliver as cleanly.

The library rentals problem

The thing that broke FAST economics over the last 18 months is library rental rates rising sharply. The major studios — particularly Sony, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros — pulled inventory from FAST platforms or raised rates significantly when they realised the channels were becoming meaningful audience capture mechanisms. Pluto TV and Tubi both went through painful library renegotiations in 2025 that resulted in some classic shows disappearing from FAST.

This is why the experimentation has accelerated. The platforms can’t rely on cheap library deals anymore, so they’re testing what else might work. Some of it will. Some of it won’t. The outcome over the next 24 months will reshape what the FAST landscape looks like.

The investment angle

For investors looking at the streaming sector, FAST is no longer the obvious growth story it was three years ago. The platforms are profitable but maturing. The growth in viewing hours has slowed. The CPM ceiling on FAST inventory is constrained by the alternative of buying connected TV inventory through the major SVOD platforms, which most advertisers still prefer.

The Australian Financial Review ran a sharp piece in April on the Australian streaming market that included some discussion of why local FAST plays haven’t taken off the way some had predicted. The short answer is that the audience is real but small, and the major broadcaster-owned BVOD services (7plus, 9Now, 10 Play) effectively occupy the local FAST niche for Australian audiences.

What watching FAST in mid-2026 actually looks like

If you actually sit down and channel-surf FAST in May 2026, the experience is uneven in interesting ways. Some channels are remarkably polished — the single-show channels especially, which can look better than basic cable used to. Some are clearly under-resourced and feel like watching a slideshow. The ad loads vary wildly. The content discovery is still terrible.

The platforms know all of this. The 2026 product roadmaps that have leaked through trade reporting suggest significant improvements coming on the recommendation and search side, with FAST channels being treated more like content libraries than linear streams. That’s the right move. Whether it’s enough to keep FAST relevant against the bigger streaming platforms’ continued expansion into ad-supported tiers is the open question.