Amagi Releases June 2026 AIRTIME Report: FAST Viewing Hours Grow 55% YoY as Metadata Friction Escalates

Includes analysis by Gavin Bridge from FASTMaster, customer spotlights, and media practitioners’ pulse survey

NEW YORK — July 1st, 2026 — Amagi, the agentic industry cloud platform for unified broadcast, streaming, and monetization, today announced the June 2026 edition of its AIRTIME Report, the company's quarterly analysis of global FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming TV) trends. The report draws on data from approximately 6,500 FAST channel deliveries distributed via Amagi THUNDERSTORM, the company's server-side ad insertion (SSAI) platform, covering the period April 1 – June 15, 2026, compared to the same period in 2025.

Global FAST growth remains robust

Across the channels tracked in this edition, global hours of viewing (HOV) grew 55% year-over-year, while ad impressions increased 53%. The U.S. and Canada remained the largest monetization market, accounting for 54% of global HOV and 74% of global ad impressions. LATAM recorded the strongest regional growth, with HOV up 190% and ad impressions up 124%, supported by Amagi's addition of new high-viewership channels and continued portfolio expansion.

Entertainment remained the leading global genre, contributing 41% of classified HOV and 40% of ad impressions. News accounted for 27% of HOV but delivered 33% of ad impressions, making it one of the strongest monetizing genres. Kids emerged as the highest-growth genre globally, with HOV up 191% and ad impressions up 118% year-over-year.

This edition's theme: the metadata reckoning

The June 2026 AIRTIME Report focuses on the growing operational and commercial cost of poor metadata across the FAST and media value chain. The report includes findings from a focused pulse survey of 28 senior practitioners spanning content owners, channel operators, broadcasters, platforms, ad-side teams, and technology vendors. More than a third of respondents hold executive leadership roles; the remainder lead product, content operations, programming, and ad operations.

Key survey findings include:

• 86% of respondents said reformatting metadata to meet each platform's different requirements is their single biggest operational drag — the most-agreed statement in the entire survey.
• 86% said poor metadata is actively costing them money through lost ad revenue, weaker discovery, or platforms deprioritizing their content.
• 71% said metadata arriving from content owners is incomplete — missing genres, ratings, imagery, or episode data — and that the problem is getting worse.
• 57% said AI can already generate synopses, tags, and genres reliably enough that human review only needs to be a spot-check.
• 68% expect AI to handle most metadata generation with minimal human oversight within three years.
• 68% expect major streaming platforms — rather than content owners — to dictate metadata standards within three years.

The survey also asked where practitioners plan to invest to improve metadata over the next 12 months. Better AI tooling — whether in-house or from vendors — was the single most-cited area, named by 32% of respondents. Building in-house metadata capability followed at 25%.

Guest analysis: Gavin Bridge, Chief Analyst, FASTMaster

This edition features an introduction and key takeaways from Gavin Bridge, Chief Analyst at FASTMaster. Bridge identifies three structural tensions shaping the metadata challenge: the format delivery "tax" — not metadata creation itself — as the dominant source of friction; distributors caught between incomplete supply-side inputs and fragmented platform demand; and a discovery layer increasingly dependent on AI agents that require richly structured metadata to function.

Bridge summarizes the strategic implication for content owners: "The metadata that wins is the kind that can be consumed by agents — human and AI. Bad metadata won't just look wrong in a grid; it'll be invisible to the systems doing the recommending."

Commenting on the report findings, Srinivasan KA, Co-founder and President - Global Business, Amagi said, "FAST has earned its place at the centre of the modern media stack. What this report makes clear is that the next competitive edge isn't reach; it's operational precision.” He further added, “Metadata is where discovery, ad revenue, and audience intelligence converge, and the industry is only beginning to close the gap between what it knows and what it acts on."

The Amagi AIRTIME Report is a quarterly publication covering FAST channel trends, ad market insights, and media operations analysis. This is the 17th edition of the report. Data in the FAST insights section is sourced from approximately 6,500 channel deliveries distributed via Amagi THUNDERSTORM and is not a universal measure of the FAST industry. Survey findings are directional and based on 28 respondents; they are not statistically representative of the broader industry.

The full report is available at https://www.amagi.com/resources/fast-report