Tubi, a division of Fox Entertainment, highlighted its growth in streaming over the past year as well as its increase in original content and entertainment FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) channels, during today’s IAB NewFront presentation.
The company unveiled more than 100 original titles that will be coming to the platform in the next 12 months, including a bunch of horror, thriller, sci-fi, adult animation, romance and Black Cinema titles. The titles announced during the presentation were Danielle Fishel’s “Classmates;” “Cinnamon,” starring Damon Wayans and Pam Grier; and “Kitchen Commando,” with military veteran and former White House Chef Andre Rush.
Plus, its original animated series “The Freak Brothers,” with voice cast Pete Davidson, Tiffany Haddish, Woody Harrelson and John Goodman, will be the first series returning for a second season, which will be released in December 2022.
Tubi also shared that it has seen significant growth in the past year, with 51 million active users as of last quarter, and had a total of 3.6 billion hours watched in 2021. For context, Tubi had 25 million active users in 2020 and 33 million last year.
Mark Rotblat, chief revenue officer at Tubi, said in a statement:
Tubi’s approach of personalization allows for content for every community, and our record growth shows it’s working. We’re doubling down on this approach while delivering our brand partners transparency and an opportunity to reach incremental, diverse, and highly engaged consumers.
In addition to new originals, more linear offerings will be added to the platform, including channels for Fox Entertainment’s “The Masked Singer” and Studio Ramsay Global’s “Gordon Ramsay.”
The free ad-supported streaming service will also continue maximizing synergy throughout the Fox portfolio, like co-productions with Bento Box Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, plus monthly documentaries and specials from Fox Alternative Entertainment and TMZ.
Actress Vivica A. Fox hosted Tubi’s presentation and was quick to say that the platform has the “largest free ad-supported library of movies and TV shows that you can find anywhere.” Overall, its content library consists of more than 40,000 titles and is home to 100+ sports and local news channels.
The chief content officer at Tubi, Adam Lewinson, said:
While other companies focus on creating a small handful of originals with broad reach, Tubi creates a massive library of originals to super serve fandoms… At a time when many companies are scaling back, Tubi is planning to double down by doubling down our number of originals.
While Lewinson apologized for the cringey dad joke, he also poked at rivals for scaling back on original content. Netflix recently had to cancel a bunch of titles.
He then shared that Tubi has been able to “capture audiences that our competitors have not.” More than a quarter (27%) of Tubi’s users are unreachable on other AVODs (ad-supported video-on-demand). Seventy-eight percent of streamers aren’t on Peacock, 68% aren’t on The Roku Channel, and 62% aren’t on Hulu, said Lewinson.
The company prides itself on being reachable to a wide audience. According to Tubi’s most recent report, “The Stream: 2022 Audience Insights for Brands,” the findings show that 71% of Tubi viewers are unreachable on cable, 56% are unreachable on linear TV and 27% are unreachable on any other major free streaming platform.
That being said, AVOD is likely to surpass SVOD (subscription video-on-demand) this year, per industry insights. For instance, in 2021, SVOD audiences grew 8% year-over-year, whereas AVOD grew double the amount at 16%. This trend will continue, Tubi said in its report, closing the approximate 5% gap between AVOD and SVOD market penetration.