Apple should embrace the live TV grid, FAST
Unless you’re looking at tiles in the Sports tab, Apple’s TV apps would prefer to pretend that live TV is not a thing that exists.
This is bad. FAST, or free ad-supported streaming television, is one of the fastest-growing segments of streaming. Tubi just broadcast the Super Bowl for the first time for free, and many networks offer free news streaming channels.
Cable TV is back, sort of
Leaving aside live sports and news, numerous streaming services now offer “live channels,” which are basically playlists that allow users to tune into a television channel and let the programming wash over them.
You like playlists, don’t you? Sure you do. So the people at the streaming service build a playlist in all sorts of categories—for example, Peacock offers hot and cold running Law & Order, Dick Wolf Chicago shows, Murder She Wrote, SNL, romantic movies, sitcoms, and many more. When you show up, you join in where it’s playing. Some channel providers offer you the ability to pause and resume those streams or start over a show you just joined from the beginning.
It’s basically old-fashioned linear programming with an imaginary DVR attached. The appeal is in the programming itself, whether it’s on a theme or it’s a mega marathon of a single show. It can increase the discovery of new shows, but perhaps more importantly, it can reduce decision paralysis where you just don’t know where to even start. Turn on the sitcom channel and start folding that laundry!
Pretty often, my boyfriend “just wants to watch TV,” so he’ll turn on the America’s Test Kitchen FAST channel. I’m pretty sure everything on it is available on YouTube, and I pay for the premium tier because I hate YouTube’s ads so very much. But he’d rather turn on the ATK FAST channel. He doesn’t have to choose what recipe video to watch, and he doesn’t have to keep picking new ones when the last one ends. The FAST channel just plays an assortment of videos interspersed with the same pharmaceutical ads that are like nails on a chalkboard for me. People are different. Who knew?
TV manufacturers often include FAST channels on their devices, but not in any kind of system-wide interface. Samsung has its uniquely named Samsung TV Plus FAST service for Samsung devices. Roku is the backbone of many low-end TVs, and it offers the Roku Channel (which is not a channel) that mixes video on demand with live TV channels.
The most ambitious, in my opinion, is Amazon. It’s pretty safe to say that I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon’s various TV offerings. They’ve got great stuff, but what a painful mess it is to try to get to that great stuff. A good thing they did was add their unified live TV guide in 2022, where the Fire TV provides a programming guide for all the services and apps you use. All of them—not just Amazon’s FAST channels.
The included FAST channels on Prime Video were recently strengthened with the addition of PBS, which has no ads and is free for Prime Video subscribers. It can streamline the experience of watching PBS for households that have cut the cord and don’t pay for PBS Passport, which requires a minimum $5 monthly contribution.
Amazon will even aggregate some live TV from partners in the Prime Video app on any platform without requiring a Fire TV. For example, if you subscribe to Paramount+ through Prime Video, you get access to the Star Trek channel.
Apple has elected not to participate in any of this. No guide that aggregates what’s available to watch on your services. Apple provides no channels of live programming. Just those sports tiles. Yay, sports.
The power of channels
There are plenty of ways that Apple could benefit from leaning into the idea of live channels. The company recently did a promotion during the first weekend of 2025 where Apple TV+ was available for free to give people a taste of Apple’s shows and movies in the hopes people would sign up. (People of a certain age will remember that cable used to have “free preview weekends” for HBO.)
Great idea, but it would be even more productive if there were channels in a guide with selected and themed Apple TV+ programming to watch. I know that most Apple TV+ shows are heavily serialized in nature, so coming in on episode four of Severance season two wouldn’t be ideal, but that’s what life was like before video on demand. If you catch something that seems interesting, you could subscribe to Apple TV+ and watch the whole thing! (And yes, if Apple wants to experiment with advertising in Apple TV+, one way to do that would be to offer FAST channels with ads.)
The other thing about TV channels is that you can offer seasonal ones. Apple makes the old Peanuts holiday specials available for free, so just put them in a Channel on a loop from October to January. It’s not a year-round channel that needs to exist. Other FAST apps do things like have a fireplace channel. It doesn’t even need to be a TV show!
Apple could even have an Apple Music channel that streams these things called music videos. Apple also has promotional videos and video podcasts they’ve made for Music that get buried and neglected in the Music app (because that’s an awful place to put them) but could find a home in a programming block. There’s potential synergy with Apple Music’s live radio channels, too.
Putting the ‘broad’ in broadcast
I’m really struck by Apple’s decision not to do anything in this area at all—not only for their stuff, but for all the other apps on their platform. There’s a real opportunity here for Apple to give insight into what’s available to watch on the various channels that are available through your apps on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV.
The truth is that while some people don’t see the need for linear programming because they know what they want to watch and their preferred experience of using the TV is exclusively on-demand programming, that’s only one way of watching TV. Some viewers just want to turn on a channel and let it wash over them. That was something that traditional TV provided that on-demand streaming failed to, and it’s why FAST has become so popular lately. It fills that need—and when people have TV viewing habits, they tend to stick to them out of comfort.
Apple should support the concept of channels, both for its content and to unlock content across its platform. And it doesn’t even need to stay locked into Apple’s platform. Apple can also partner with other apps, services, and networks to carry Apple’s channels on their platforms. Their live programming can appear right in the Fire TV live guide alongside everything else.
In other words, Apple is losing two ways by failing to embrace live channels. It’s missing an opportunity to promote its content, and it’s making tvOS and the TV apps poorer by hiding the rich streams of content available elsewhere. FAST isn’t for everyone, but it’s for a growing number of people. Apple’s abandonment of this category needs to end.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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