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It’s taken a while to get here. When Fubo Sports Network launched in fall 2019, the concept of a free ad-supported streaming channel built around live sports was still novel enough that the team went from idea to market in about five months. “We were the OG,” said Pamela Duckworth, who has overseen Fubo Sports Network since its creation.

Six-and-a-half years later, the sports FAST space has grown by what Duckworth quipped “20-fold,” and the defining challenge has flipped from building the category to surviving it. What Fubo Sports Network has that most of the field doesn’t is distribution. Eighteen platform partners, including Prime Video, LG Channels, Samsung TV Plus and The Roku Channel, plus OTA reach, give it coverage throughout around 90% of the country. However, Duckworth is direct about how difficult that might be to accomplish today.

“Distribution is the hardest thing to get right now. That’s why we were super fortunate in 2019 launching and now having 18 different partners. That’s not easy,” she said.

Steve Shannon, Founder and CEO of combat sports FAST platform Swerve TV, went as far as to say scoring distribution on one of the top FAST platforms makes a channel “virtually guaranteed to pay for themselves” by virtue of the built-in audiences those platforms offer. He knows a thing or two about building a successful FAST platform, having helped build The Roku Channel during his time as GM, Content Services at Roku. The distribution issue gets even more difficult when it comes to emerging leagues.

“Right now, it’s way too hard for a niche sports league to get distribution in FAST. The platforms are still focused on big deals with big companies,” Shannon said. “There are a few of us that got in early enough to be able to grab some real estate there, but I would say by and large, it’s too hard for niche sports leagues to gain distribution on these major FAST platforms.”

A good example of that came during Monday’s Fox-Roku call, when an analyst asked if the deal would change Fox’s appetite for Tier 3 sports. CEO Lachlan Murdoch called it an interesting question that’s too early to answer before proceeding to talk about the importance of its Tier 1 sports deals and how Roku can assist with viewership.

Fubo Sports Network and Swerve TV share the underlying logic that FAST offers what no other video environment can replicate. To Shannon, FAST is a “constant river of eyeballs” while putting up a VOD asset is “a ghost town.”

The discovery dynamic is taking more focus as well. Duckworth cited Deloitte research suggesting 2/3 of Gen Z and millennials already watch FAST channels. So, instead of a standalone revenue engine, Duckworth—Shannon as well—describe FAST’s primary value to sports programmers as a top-of-the-funnel mechanism to build awareness, social followings or drive paid subscriptions and PPV purchases.

Shannon notes a wrinkle though: FAST lifts VOD. “When we add a FAST channel, the video on-demand traffic goes way up,” he said. “FAST drives VOD, which a lot of folks don’t realize, and in fact they’re starting to merge—where Pluto TV and Roku, they have a feature where you can play it from the beginning.”

Live sports, the most coveted property in any distribution format, challenges the FAST space’s structural build. Duckworth believes live rights will continue to belong to companies that have the budget to grab them, citing Fubo Sports Network’s ability to air UEFA matches and Mountain West sports through rights deals made by vMVPD Fubo as the type of leverage smaller FAST channels don’t have access to. Similarly, Tubi has benefitted from Fox’s sports portfolio, most notably streaming Super Bowl LIX and amassing 15.5 million peak concurrent streaming viewers alongside an average minute audience of 13.6 million.

Shannon approaches the live sports obstacle from a different angle, arguing the platform side of the equation needs work regardless of who’s paying for rights. In the current FAST environment, he said live events and replays are nearly indistinguishable to viewers because platforms don’t promote them differently enough.

“It’s very difficult to know what’s live versus what’s a replay,” Shannon said. “Our typical mode is, we’ll air something live, we’ll record it and edit it down, then we’ll run it again like a dozen times. The replays don’t fare much differently than the live events, and that’s because of lack of promotion, really, by the platforms.”

Both programmers see a creator economy wave coming to FAST, and they’re already moving toward it. Fubo Sports Network recently partnered with Jomboy Media on a channel and is actively recruiting other creators. Duckworth frames the network’s distribution footprint as what it brings to those partnerships. Shannon said podcasting is Swerve’s current focus and describes creator-driven FAST as a mechanism for broadening the audience beyond what he sees as FAST’s current demographic ceiling—a cord-cutter base that skews lower income.

“We have to not just be led by our noses with data, and instead have a vision for what the audience is going to be over time,” Shannon said, adding that he’s convinced FAST is foundationally built for sustained growth. “Every eyeball that goes to YouTube is money they are not getting. They found that FAST is a great way to compete with YouTube.”

The category is getting more competitive as more viewers explore the FAST world. But the trajectory is looking upward as more sports, channels and platforms look to break through with another form of revenue.

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And their ultimate effect on our regulatory and legal policies related to new communications technology could result in serious economic and technical burns.

Here’s what’s happened so far: The AI company Anthropic had already limited the distribution of its newest and most powerful model, Mythos, because the company said it was too strong to release generally since it was easily finding ways to locate heretofore-unearthed vulnerabilities in other programs. Some of those programs have been around for years. They worked with the U.S. government to distribute the new program to select other companies to allow them to use it (including the U.S. government) to essentially re-examine all the other programs being used to find unknown flaws. Anthropic then released a new “consumer” version of Mythos called Fable last week.

But Amazon, which is often asked by the government to vet high-level programs for security issues (as are most of the other major AI companies), reported back that they still found some ways to get around some of the basic guardrails Anthropic had constructed around Fable. The government security folks forwarded that information to Anthropic, which reportedly responded that those circumventing methods were common and anticipated by just about all AI programs. They apparently did not consider it significant and said they would work to close any loopholes.

Here’s where the story gets messy. The government says its concerns were ignored and Anthropic did not do what they had agreed to do in the past. Communications between the two sides got testy. Anthropic says it was then told that it had 90 minutes to take down both Mythos and Fable if things weren’t resolved. In less than a day, Anthropic got a notice that they were required to stop distributing their strongest new AI models not only internationally to foreign users (Mythos was already in approved limited international distribution) but that even here, in the United States, it was restricted and could not be used by any foreign nationals. These orders, from the White House, were based on sweeping export control rules that cited national security.

As of this writing, that’s where we are. Anthropic is reportedly sending its top technical folks to D.C. for detailed discussions that hopefully will result in the administration being satisfied with whatever the company does to show that they have resolved any jailbreak potential of the new Fable consumer model. It’s not clear to me why Mythos was included in the order since both Anthropic and the government had already agreed on how it could be put in limited distribution. But I’m sure we’ll learn more.

The point here is not who’s wrong and who’s right, or whether this was, indeed, a major security issue or not. There’s no way, in my view, that programs like Mythos and Fable will not swiftly be a part of the computer ecosystem. It’s almost impossible to stop that. What’s concerning is how this all happened: a chaotic couple of days. We simply don’t have any legal, regulatory or political mechanisms to adequately deal with technology that is moving as fast as AI. There are some very basic questions we have yet to broadly consider or codify in a regulatory or Congressional setting.

For instance, in this case, is it better to distribute a program so other computer users can use it to fix flaws in their own systems, or can we truly sequester these programs so that others will not get them? Let’s remember that China, for instance, is just a short way behind us in developing the exact same capabilities. Also, attempting to “ban” allowing “foreign nationals” in the United States from access to American developed programs like Mythos or Fable is somewhat of a chimera since a significant number of the folks who have been recruited by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and the like are foreign nationals! Are we saying the folks who designed these programs can no longer use or continue to develop them if they stay here? That’s just not going to work. It will only hurt our own position.

As I said, hopefully the current dumpster fire will be extinguished. But we have to seriously, quickly, consider how to avoid future ones.

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This year’s recipients each receive $10,000 contributions. They are selected based on their support of creatives and artists via community-driven programming or for serving as advocates for equity and access to the arts. Organizations can also be chosen for providing accessible community spaces for creative expression.

Among the 2026 honorees is the Louisville Orchestra, which performed on the 2024 Grammy-winning recording “The American Project,” featuring Teddy Abrams’s Piano Concerto with Yuja Wang. Also in the mix are the nationally acclaimed John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which draws more than 100,000 visitors annually to a city of about 50,000 and the volunteer-driven Holland Project, which produces more than 300 all-ages events annually in Reno.

“Through our continued support of Ovation’s Stand For The Arts Awards, we recognize the organizations and leaders expanding access to creative expression and cultural experiences across the country,” said Adam Falk, Senior Vice President, State Government Affairs at Spectrum.

The 2026 honorees are:

Winter Park, FL: The Winter Park Playhouse

Loudon, TN: Loudon County Concert Band

Louisville, KY: Louisville Orchestra

Rochester, MN: Rochester Art Center

Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center

New York City, NY: Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling

Auburn, NY: Auburn Public Theater

Reno, NV: The Holland Project

Oahu, HI: Hawai’i Youth Symphony

Telluride, CO: Sheridan Arts Foundation 

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