Nielsen Gracenote Tracking Unpredictable Changes in Video

Continued growth in the number of FAST channels

• The number of FAST channels in Gracenote’s database has increased by nearly 27% year-over-year, to 2,063
• U.S., Great Britain, Germany and Canada have the most channels, with Germany’s channel count increasing by 41% to 148 and Canada’s by 51% to 129

FAST Content also growing

• The number of TV shows, sports shows and movies increased by 26% year-over-year.
• Sports had the biggest increase in shows with 32% more than a year ago. Movies grew by 26% and TV shows by 24%.

FAST News shows increasing fastest

• There is 58% more news programming on FAST than there was a year ago.
• The proportion of FAST programming taken up by news has increased from 8.1% to 10.8% in the past year - an increase of 33%.
• News is now the third most prevalent genre of FAST programming after Documentary and Drama, up from fourth a year ago.

A lot of this increase is coming from U.S. local TV station news. Interestingly, when I asked Gemini to classify the new news FAST channels as to political leaning, the great majority came back as being non-partisan/centrist. Out of 200+ news channels on FAST only 7 came back as right-leaning and only 3 came back as left-leaning. This suggests that despite the tendency for national linear TV networks to choose sides, local TV has largely resisted that tendency and remains the bastion of actual objective journalism. All the more important that local TV remain in existence.

Decline in music shows on FAST

• There has been a 18% drop in the proportion of FAST shows with the genre Music.
• Music was the fifth biggest genre on FAST a year ago, making up 6.8% of schedules. This has dropped to 5.5% making music the seventh-biggest genre.

U.S. shows and movies on FAST declining

• U.S. produced programming makes up 38% of the content on FAST channels, declining from 42% a year ago. The volume of U.S. made content has still increased, just not to the extent that others have.
• Japanese content is the fastest growing on FAST, increasing by a third in the last year.

The increase in Asian programming also shows up in SVOD, which we will now turn to next.

Content up by one-fifth on leading five SVOD services

• The total catalog growth of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney+, Netflix and Paramount+ has increased by 20% year-over-year.
• There are 20% more TV shows, 21% more movies and 12.5% more sports shows across these services than there were in January 2025.
• Taking episodes into account, which are often games or sports events, the amount of sports on these services has increased by 52%.

The percentage of U.S. produced programming continues to decline, Japanese content growing fastest on Amazon

• U.S. made shows and movies represent a smaller proportion of the catalogs of the five leading services. Currently 41.9% of what is available was made in the U.S., down from 44.7% a year ago. The volume of U.S. made content has still increased, just not to the extent that others have.
• The percentage of Japanese content has more than doubled on these services from 3% of programming in January 2025 to 6.1% a year later.
• The volume of Japanese content on these services has increased by 146%, to 6,578 different titles.
• The largest increase of Japanese shows and movies is on Amazon Prime Video, which now has 6.1% of its content from Japan, compared with 2.2% a year ago.
• Japan is now the fourth-biggest production country on Prime Video (up from 10th a year ago), after the U.S., Great Britain and India.

Korean-produced content second biggest on Netflix

• 9.8% of the Netflix catalog is made up of South Korean programming, up from 8.1% in January 2025. South Korea is now the second-largest production country on Netflix.
• Japan has become the third-largest production country after an increase to 9.5% of the Netflix catalog (from 6.5% a year ago).
• U.S. produced shows and movies now make up less than one-third of Netflix content (31.9%), the lowest proportion of any of the leading SVOD providers.

With regard to the 52% increase in sports on SVOD and 32% growth in sports on FAST, Bill Quinn offers further important detail: “The overwhelming majority of programming on FAST is competitions (95%+). It's more like one-third on SVOD. The catch here is that not all of the events are live. FAST has quite a bit of archival games that run, but we are seeing an uptick in new and live on FAST. I believe ~30% in January 2026, for example.”

Gracenote has also put out a new special report on program discovery, and the tendency for AI to be used more and more for finding programs to watch. “TV Search and Discovery in the AI Era” is based on an online survey of 4,003 U.S. AI chatbot users ages 13-79, fielded Jan. 23 to Feb. 4, 2026. Gen Alpha findings are based on respondents ages 13 and 14. It also draws on Gracenote’s 2025 Streaming Consumer Survey (N=3,000 across six countries) and industry data from Nielsen, PwC, Deloitte, Pew Research Center and Veed Analytics. The free report is available for downloadhere.

As adoption of AI-powered entertainment experiences grows—especially among older Gen Alpha respondents (ages 13 and 14)—trust in chatbot-generated responses to content-related queries is lagging.

Gracenote found that usage of chatbots for a range of purposes is gaining traction across generations, with 66% reporting increased use over the past 12 to 18 months. Among Gen Alpha, that figure rises to 80%, and more than half say they use chatbots daily.

That momentum is already shaping how this group discovers entertainment. When asked to name the best source for TV and movie recommendations, 49% of Gen Alpha chose web- and app-based AI chatbots, topping streaming and cable service user interfaces and program guides (41%) and internet search engine results (11%). The trend extends beyond Gen Alpha: 57% of all respondents said these tools could become, or already are, their favored way to get information on why, where and when to watch content.

At the same time, the data points to a growing divide between AI’s utility and users’ trust in its results. Respondents prefer chatbots over traditional search for complex questions (68% vs. 19%), follow-up questions (69% vs. 18%), direct answers (54% vs. 31%) and comprehensive results (50% vs. 30%). Traditional search, however, still leads on trustworthiness (50% vs. 27%) and accuracy (46% vs. 33%).

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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