Local news on FAST
Local news is the fastest-growing thing on free streaming television and the worst-resourced. Viewing on connected TV grew about 69% year on year through 2025 while newsroom headcount went the other way. That gap is the whole story of this segment.
The demand is real and measurable
By August 2025 local stations were averaging around 61,000 viewers via OTT, up roughly 69% on the year before. About a quarter of US households have now watched news on a FAST service. Samsung TV Plus alone carries local coverage across 114 US markets — a distribution footprint that did not exist for local news five years ago.
The reason is straightforward. A local channel that used to require a transmitter, a tower and an FCC licence now requires a schedule and a delivery pipeline. The barrier moved from capital to operations.
The supply side went the other way
At the same time, the economics of local news kept contracting. Station groups have been cutting newsroom headcount while announcing 24/7 streaming strategies — E.W. Scripps cut 268 roles in 2026 in the same period it moved to a round-the-clock streaming model. Those two things are only compatible if the hours get filled differently.
That is the honest framing of this market. Nobody is launching a 24/7 local channel because they hired enough journalists to fill one. They are launching because the distribution is available and the alternative is ceding the market, and then facing the question of what plays at 3am.
Who is actually doing this
- Station groups extending an existing broadcast newsroom into a continuous streaming channel, where the constraint is hours rather than journalism.
- Publishers with a strong local text brand and no video operation at all — the hardest start, and the one where automation changes the answer most.
- Regional and language-specific operators serving an audience the national platforms underserve, often with wire video plus local production.
- Rights holders with footage and no editorial staff, who need the channel to be credible before it can be commercial.
What makes news harder than other FAST content
Every other genre on FAST is library content: it was true when it was made and it is still watchable a year later. News is the opposite. A package is worth most in the hour it is produced and becomes actively misleading soon after, which means there is no back catalogue to loop and no way to build a buffer.
So the production rate has to match the broadcast rate, permanently. That is a fundamentally different operational problem from scheduling a film library, and it is why news channels are over-represented among FAST launches that quietly go dark.
Where MediaBlaze fits
MediaBlaze is built for exactly this shape of problem: agency wire video from AP, AFP and Reuters that you already licence, turned into finished packages — script written from the shot list, voiceover generated, segments assembled, ad breaks marked — with an editor approving each one before it reaches air.
The editorial control is the point rather than a caveat. Nothing goes to your playout partner that a person has not approved, which is the only basis on which automated news is defensible at all.